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COFxTRIGHT DEPOSm 



PARENT, CHILD, AND 
CHURCH 



BY 

CHARLES CLARK SMITH 

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THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 

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Copyright, 1915, by 
CHARLES CLARE SMITH 



The Bible text used in this volume is taken from the American 
Standard Edition of the Revised Bible, copyright, 1001, by 
Thomas Nelson & Sons, and is used by permission. 

SEP 14 1915 

©C1.A411475 



TO MY MOTHER 

WHO, POSSESSED OF A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS 

NATURE, REARED A LARGE FAMILY WHO 

HONOR HER MEMORY, LOVE HER CHURCH, 

AND WORSHIP HER GOD 

TO MY WIFE 
WHOSE CHRISTIAN TEACHiING HAS IM- 
PRESSED ITSELF UPON OUR FAMILY 

TO THESE TWO MOTHERS 

TO WHOM I OWE SO MUCH 

I DEDICATE 

THIS LITTLE VOLUME 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTERS PAGE 

Preface 7 

I. The Child and Church Organizations ... 9 

II. The Mission of the Little Child 33 

III. Heredity and Environment 67 

IV. Instinctive, Intelligent, and Adolescent 

Periods 107 

V. The Theology of Childhood Religion . . . 141 



PREFACE 

The following pages have been written 
with the conviction that others have experi- 
enced perplexities similar to my own in 
passing from a reUgious childhood, through 
a reUgious youth, to a reUgious manhood 
without ever having consciously experienced 
conversion, and still finding no place for that 
sort of reUgious development in such preach- 
ing as I was permitted to hear; and instead 
of deriving comfort from reUgious services, 
being, rather, made miserable, lest my reU- 
gious life was seriously at fault somewhere 
without being able to discover just where. 
Since working in the pastorate I have made 
the acquaintance of several young people 
aU of whom were trying to fit the experience 
of conversion, as popularly preached, into 
their Uves with the same unsatisfactory re- 
sults that I had experienced in my youthful 
days. Their Christian lives were of a high 
prder^ and conversation with them along 

7 



PREFACE 

lines similar to what follows seemed to meet 
a great need in their lives. My personal 
experience, coupled with this pastoral ob- 
servation, suggested the need of a book 
written in simple language calling attention 
to a very vital religious principle, in no way 
newly discovered, but rather under-empha- 
sized in general preaching. The subject- 
matter has been used largely in a series of 
sermons leading up to and culminating in 
Children's Day. The results have been 
gratifying in some respects in that young 
Christians have been helped and parents led 
to a more serious consideration of their op- 
portunities and responsibilities in training 
children. These results have prompted me 
to put the thoughts into a more permanent 
form for perhaps a larger audience. There 
is no attempt at critical and exhaustive 
treatment. This is left for the extended 
works on systematic theology. The one 
thought is that perhaps a few pastors, Sun- 
day school teachers, and parents may profit 
somewhat by the reading, and give unfold- 
ing childhood a better chance. 

Charles Clark Smith. 



CHAPTER I 

THE CHILD AND CHURCH 
ORGANIZATIONS 



CHAPTER I 

THE CHILD AND CHURCH 
ORGANIZATIONS 

The organized church is manifestly a 
development from very humble beginnings 
to its present very large proportions, and 
because it is a development we may conclude 
that it is not of necessity a perfect piece of 
ecclesiastical machinery, but, rather, an insti- 
tution calculated to grow still larger and be- 
come still better fitted to serve the needs of 
mankind. It is very plain that there has 
been a human element in the development of 
this great organization, or perhaps it would 
be more accurate to say these organizations, 
because viewed as ecclesiastical bodies we 
have several distinct churches. The writer 
believes heartily in the church as an institu- 
tion, and believes that we should continue to 
study, as have our forefathers, that we may 
continue to show ourselves workmen that do 
not need to be ashamed. We are not as 

a 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

perfect as we may become. Because there 
has been and is the human element in the 
church, there are for that reason imperfec- 
tions and weaknesses. In the very rapid 
growth of the modern Protestant Church 
with its spirit of revolt from the ancient 
established church, it is not at all unlikely 
that we have overlooked some important 
principles, or in our revolt swung the pen- 
dulum of reform too far aside, and now that 
we have come to rather a more considerate 
day we will need to look over the past and 
see what we have neglected in our hurried 
advance. Principles are sometimes con- 
demned when the defect is in the form of 
expression and not in the principle, and what 
we need to do, instead of condemning them, 
is to sift them and retain whatever is good. 
One may easily be deceived in studying the 
history of the church and be led to overesti- 
mate the value of certain activities a century 
ago because time has a fashion of exaggerat- 
ing the luster of the good and diminishing 
the shadows of the manifestly bad. So we 
need always to be guarded in comparing 
the past, with its dim recollections of detail, 
with the present, in which everything is 

12 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

clearly seen. But something of comparison 
will surely be helpful and will lead us to 
the conclusion that all that has passed is not 
useless, but, rather, constitutes the founda- 
tion on which the present is building. It 
appears that in at least one particular we 
of this generation are not on a par with the 
church workers of perhaps fifty years ago. 
Generally speaking, love for and devotion 
to the church is not so strong to-day as it 
was formerly, not so strong surely as it 
should be to-day in order that the church 
may do her best work. I am not pleading 
for a return to the sectarianism of the for- 
mer age — far from it. True devotion to the 
church is as much above narrow sectarianism 
as true patriotism is above partisan politics. 
But I would plead for a return to that in- 
tense devotion to the church which our fore- 
fathers knew, and I believe such a return 
to be a great good which may be accom- 
plished in this generation. 

We may well be very hopeful for the 
future. The church was never better, on the 
whole, but it is destined to become still 
better. If we can intensify the powers al- 
ready in our possession and utilize the wast- 

13 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

ing forces, we will greatly increase our effi- 
ciency. Therefore, without any disposition 
to glorify the past unduly, let us admit that 
the past can be our teacher in some particu- 
lars still. We greatly deplore some present- 
day tendencies which seem to manifest them- 
selves among our young people. Every 
conference, convention or informal church 
assembly brings out this discussion. There 
is generally a lack of a sense of responsi- 
bility to the church, and often a disregard of 
those principles for which the church has 
long stood. We have lots of machinery 
planned to meet the needs of these young 
people, but we cannot refrain from asking 
whether we are doing as much for our youth 
with this machinery as the church of another 
generation did without it. If we are not 
doing all that we might, the remedy is not to 
be foimd in a criticism of the young people 
for their disregard of the church, nor in a 
decrying of the fact of much machinery in 
the church, but, rather, in educating parents 
so that they will work with the church in 
correcting the wrong conceptions and con- 
duct. The secret of strong devotion to the 
church lies with the parents. The Protestant 

14 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

Church must turn its attention to home 
training rather than to organizations of the 
church for a solution to this very obvious 
weakness in our practice. The church can 
help, but it cannot do the chief work. This 
means that the pastor must engage the 
assistance of the parents in the religious 
training of the children. How strange it 
soimds to imply that it is difficult to enlist 
the sympathies of the parents in the training 
of their children. And yet pastors will 
testify that this is one of the most difficult of 
all pastoral problems; difficult, not because 
the parents are really indifferent to the reU- 
gious welfare of their children, but, rather, 
because they do not, as a rule, understand 
what is involved and what great things can 
be done. It is a question, then, first of 
educating the parents. The pastor must 
study this subject and preach it to his people 
until their thought is fixed upon it and their 
sjonpathies fully enlisted. He must con- 
vince and lead the parents until once again 
we have religious training in the home. 

The church is largely to blame for con- 
ditions existing. Our theology of childhood 
has been wrongly preached, and the now 

15 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

prevalent inactivity with regard to our chil- 
dren's religious life is the result. It is time 
to quit preaching an antiquated theory of 
the origin of sin that contradicts both the 
Bible and reason and to begin to preach 
what Christ taught with reference to the 
child and what modern pedagogic principles 
have made very plain to us. Our public 
school methods are much more intelligently 
applied than our religious methods, When 
the pulpit presents to the people a concep- 
tion of child religion that fits the conditions 
and shows the possibilities of religious activ- 
ities for the youth, then the parents will 
become interested in the proper develop- 
ment of their children. 

Perhaps, then, I should revise a statement 
made above and say that the education must 
begin with the pulpit. The prevailing con- 
ception as it has been preached is that a child 
is a sort of religious nonentity until he comes 
to the age of accountability, when he must 
be converted before he can have a religious 
life. Naturally, from this conception there 
will spring no motive for early religious 
training. The parent who believes what has 
been preached generally will say: "What is 

16 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

the use? We will wait till the child is a 
little older, and some time when there is a 
special opportunity we will seek to get him 
converted, and then he will be all right." 
Parents have been known to object to their 
children being catechized along religious 
lines because they were grounded in the be- 
lief that the child is a sort of zero quantity 
religiously. At least one case is known to 
the writer where parents, who were them- 
selves members of the church and of average 
intelligence, objected to their children, aged 
ten and twelve years respectively, being 
taken into the church because, as they said, 
such children could not understand what was 
implied by coming into the church. Many 
other cases, perhaps not so extreme, have 
come to our attention, and it is the common 
experience of pastors. Such ignorance must 
somehow be dispelled and the pulpit must 
show that, according to Christ's own words, 
the fittest subject for the kingdom of heaven, 
and therefore for the church, is the little 
child. To this end we must bend our teach- 
ing and the offices which the church intrusts 
to us. 

What pastor is there who has not been 

17 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

greatly perplexed over the common distinc- 
tion between church and Sunday school? 
What preacher has not had a suggestion of 
heartache as he was compelled to stand by 
Sabbath after Sabbath while his Sunday 
school filed out and his church filed in, or 
the reverse, as the hours may alternate? 
How he has longed for the opportunity of 
preaching regularly to that group of young 
people. I am not unmindful of the various 
devices employed to keep this youthful audi- 
ence in the church, but at best such schemes 
are temporary and do not get at the heart 
of the difficulty. The child trapped or 
baited to attend church is not the ideal. The 
child loving to attend church is what we need, 
and this is not impossible of attainment. If 
parents and church will work together 
wisely, this good end can be accomplished, 
not only to the blessing of the young, but 
as well, a benediction to the older ones. 
There is no mistaking the two congregations 
in most instances. Here are the mature 
and elderly people who, as they wrongly 
suppose, have outgrown the Sunday school. 
The church is their special zone of influence. 
Here are the children and young people, 

18 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

who feel that they have no connection with 
the church, which, of course, belongs to the 
older folks, while the Sunday school belongs 
particularly to them. This idea is as strong 
with the elders as with the juniors. They 
talk it in that way and live according to that 
plan, and what wonder that the young 
people have no other thought. We are of 
the second generation trained somewhat 
according to this notion. We must be rid 
of it before our children perpetuate our 
error. Some elders are not above resenting 
as a sort of encroachment upon their par- 
ticular prerogatives any entrance of the 
young people into church leadership, and 
particularly so, if these young people are 
given places on the official board. They 
are at once accused of trying to run the 
church and of displacing the venerable 
brethren who have borne the burdens all 
through the years. The pastor may know 
that such a complainant ought to be removed 
from the board at once, but the accusation 
indicates a condition that is more serious 
than the complaint itself. It is a symptom 
of internal disorder that should be corrected. 
On the other hand, some young people think, 

19 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

and are not slow in expressing their 
thoughts, that the older people should stay 
out of the Sunday school, or at least be very 
humble members. If they attend the young 
people's society, they must be silent specta- 
tors only. There is no need to discuss the 
relative merits of these two positions. They 
are both wrong, and if reduced to matter of 
debate we will all agree. It is our practice 
rather than our theory that is at fault. It 
is seriously to be doubted whether we ever 
outgrow the need for the Sunday school, 
and equally so whether we are ever too 
young to derive benefit from the church 
services. This telescoping of audiences 
cannot be other than painful to the thought- 
ful pastor, and anything which will help to 
stop it even a little is to be welcomed. The 
final solution lies with the parents. When 
they are brought to understand how impor- 
tant it is that the child shall be consciously 
related to the church, they will then quite 
easily effect the cure of the now too preva- 
lent evil. 

If the observation and reading of the 
writer have not misled him, this telescoping 
of audiences is not peculiar to one part of the 

20 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

country but is general in all sections and in 
all denominations and with practically all 
sorts of preachers. We must make only one 
class of exceptions: the Catholics, Episco- 
palians, and Lutherans, churches who train 
their children, do not offer this problem to 
any great extent. The fact itself is serious 
enough, because these young people are 
missing the greatest opportunity which the 
church has to offer them. Serious indeed 
and difficult of approach is the cause which 
lies back of that. A very serious phase, per- 
haps the most serious, is that we quite gener- 
ally assume that a highly organized church, 
such as we have to-day, can take care of all 
the spiritual needs of the child. The whole 
religious nature of the infant and adolescent 
is committed to the various children's and 
young people's societies. The home shirks 
its duty and the church proper gets little 
chance at the developing child. We have no 
complaint to lodge against the various de- 
partmental organizations as such, but the 
misuse of them as is common to-day must be 
corrected. We should bring the strongest 
possible protest before the parents against 
intrusting to the church auxiliaries the tre- 

21 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

mendously important work of training the 
child rehgiously. We can in no wise follow 
the line of least resistance in this matter. It 
may be easier to send the child to the Sunday 
school and to the junior society than it is to 
give him the time in the home and to take 
him to church, but yve must know that the 
former method of farming out his religious 
training is inadequate and will bring him to 
young manhood knowing nothing of the 
church and caring nothing for it. He will 
need these auxiliary aids, but he will need 
much more than these. We have come to 
place the secular education of the child 
wholly with the public school, and it is 
doubtful whether this is altogether wise. In 
accord with this same idea we place the 
religious education and training also with 
outside parties, very much to the child's dis- 
advantage. The public school has the advan- 
tage generally of trained teachers, while too 
often the Sunday school teacher, while the 
best that is available, is unqualified to teach 
the children great religious truths. This is 
an easy method by which parents may be led 
to think that they have done their duty by 
their children, but it will not meet the needs 

22 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

of the child, no matter how efficient these 
auxiliary societies may be. The home must 
ever be the center of the rehgious training 
of the child. The home atmosphere must be 
conducive to religious growth. It must be 
the place where good church habits are 
established. 

The young people of to-day, with note- 
worthy exceptions, attend worship, if at all, 
as a matter of social convenience rather than 
as a duty and as an opportunity, and have 
little thought of sacrifice on behalf of the 
church. Only the occasional young man or 
woman, reared in our church homes, will 
assume responsibility when asked, and very 
few indeed think of giving of their substance 
to the support of the church, although they 
have means in abundance to spend on 
pleasure. This may sound rather like a 
sweeping indictment, but unless we are 
greatly misled by our observation and read- 
ing it is true. At least it is too generally 
true to be passed over lightly by church 
leaders who desire genuine progress in future 
years. It proves beyond doubt a fimda- 
mental defect somewhere in our methods. 
Whether it proves too much dependence in 

25 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

church auxiliary societies or not may be de- 
bated, but it most certainly proves a defect. 
Any system of church work that disasso- 
ciates young people from the church proper 
needs to be corrected. The writer cannot 
escape the conviction already expressed that 
the home more than any other one thing 
must determine the spirit of loyalty to the 
church. The conception which the parent 
embodies into action will work itself out 
largely in the child. If church worship is 
looked upon by the parent as a convenience 
rather than a sacred obligation, if social 
functions and fraternal life and Sunday 
visiting and Sunday picnics and Sunday 
sports are allowed to take precedence over 
the church, it will be idle for the parent so 
involved to try to teach the child that the 
church is sacred above these things. The 
child will conclude, and rightly, that first 
things come first, and that for his parents 
the church is only a third or fourth-rate 
institution. 

In the church of which the writer is pastor 
there is at least one remarkable case of 
loyalty to the church. It will serve to illus- 
trate what has gone before. The young 

24 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

lady who is church pianist has held that 
position for seven consecutive years, and 
during these years of service she has been 
absent from her post of duty only four times, 
and for each of the absences had a good 
excuse and had already provided for a sub- 
stitute organist to take her place. During 
most of the time she has been a high school 
student and since graduation a teacher, but 
the church has learned to expect her services 
every Sunday, and for special meetings and 
often for funeral occasions, and she very 
seldom fails. The record is all the more 
remarkable when it is added that she was 
elected to the position when only twelve 
years old. This is a record of fidelity which 
will be hard to surpass. It should be said 
also that the young lady receives no remu- 
neration for her work, which is more than 
average in quality, except an occasional 
present at Christmas time or on her birth- 
day. Now, the explanation of this very 
remarkable case of fidelity lies not wholly 
with the young lady herself, but partly with 
the good mother who has spent much time 
training the daughter in fidelity to the church 
and in planning with her that she should 

25 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

not be hindered in the performance of her 
duty to the church. What this mother has 
accomplished other fathers and mothers can 
do, and this sort of work with the young 
people in the home will give us many who 
are thoroughly devoted to the church. 

If these pages have any excuse for having 
been written, it is the hope that they may 
contribute in some small way to the proper 
upbuilding of a home sentiment concerning 
the church and thus cause to develop early in 
the minds of the young people a sense of 
responsibility to that institution which has 
brought to them the good news of salvation 
and has made their day the most opportune 
of all the ages. The book is an appeal largely 
to parents, Sunday school teachers, and also 
to pastors looking to a saner view of child 
religion than is generally held and hence to 
a more practical view of what may be done 
for the child. That the present indifferent 
attitude of parents is due to a wrong theo- 
logical viewpoint may be rather a bold 
assumption, but I cannot escape the convic- 
tion that such is the case and, furthermore, 
I can see no hope for a large betterment, to 
say nothing of a complete solution of 

36 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

present-day conditions, until popular senti- 
ment and opinion are changed. 

The lines of thought which are to follow 
are in no sense new, for a careful study of 
the church and of theological thought reveals 
the fact that they have been held all along 
throughout the development of our great 
ecclesiastical bodies, but the principles have 
been overshadowed and have had no ade- 
quate opportunity to make themselves 
powerful. It is time to emphasize the Christ 
view. We have turned decidedly in that 
direction, and never before in the history of 
thought have we been looking so earnestly 
toward a solution. But we leave old thought 
positions slowly and accept different con- 
clusions with difficulty. But Christ taught 
very plainly, and, surely, he is the authority. 
Our chief difficulty is that we have started 
our theology with man the sinner and have 
sought to work backward to the child and 
forward toward man redeemed. We must 
learn to start with the child, as Christ did, 
and turn our vision wholly forward. The 
parent must be awakened to the appalling 
fact of loss from our good homes and shown 
how much of this loss may be averted. He 

27 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

must be shown that he has intrusted to his 
keeping not a soul bhghted in sin, but a soul 
pure as heaven itself, pronounced by Christ 
to be the type of those who are fit for the 
kingdom. 

The biggest business we have in all the 
world is not the accumulation of wealth, the 
attainment of fame or position or the ac- 
quirement of ease and luxury; our supreme 
task is to bring up our children in the nur- 
ture and admonition of the Lord. Such 
words are easy to write, and will receive a 
ready assent, but do we really believe it? 
Let us compare a couple of homes which 
may be found in any community. Here is 
a home where the passion for wealth and 
social position predominates, where the reli- 
gious life of the children receives but slight 
attention. The husband, having inherited 
considerable wealth, thrives in business and 
acquires positions of influence by reason of 
the prestige which his wealth gives him. The 
wife wins a high place in the social circles 
and because of her elegant home and elab- 
orate entertainments is highly regarded in 
the community. On the other side of the 
street is a home where the predominating 

28 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

thought is character development. The 
father is industrious, but his initial capital 
was small and his code of honor forbids him 
doing a questionable thing in business to in- 
crease his capital, and so perhaps he does not 
become wealthy. There is, however, a high 
mental and spiritual atmosphere in the home, 
and much is said about honor and righteous- 
ness and religion. The family are devoted 
to the church and use their influence for 
good in the conmiunity. The father and 
mother teach their children not only by pre- 
cept but also by example. They are genu- 
inely Christian parents and count their gain 
not only in dollars and cents, but more par- 
ticularly in the unimpeachable characters 
forming in their children. Their home is 
moderately humble and the father's political 
and social influence is small. The mother is 
not known socially in any large way. Which 
home will the average citizen point out as 
the more successful? Which home does 
popular judgment pronounce the better? 
Which home do we Christian parents deem 
the better? We will have no difliculty in 
learning the consensus of opinion in the 
average community with reference to this 

29 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

comparison. Community life in general will 
pronounce in favor of the man who amasses 
wealth, paying little heed to the character 
forming in his children. But when we re- 
flect we must admit that the family atmos- 
phere where good character is formed, and 
from which children go out to found Chris- 
tian homes, and in turn hand down Christian 
ideals to their children and grandchildren, 
is worth more to society and to the church 
and to God. We must reverse popular 
judgment and convince our young people 
that the greatest business on earth is not 
financial and social success, but, rather, right 
living. "We have but one great problem 
before us : How shall we best transmit to our 
children the fruits of our effort?" (Frank 
Crane.) There is only one answer: By 
transmitting good character bred to do the 
right and steeped in loyalty to the church 
and the propagation of righteousness. It 
is not implied by the contrast that wealth 
and attainment are necessarily in antago- 
nism to good character development. It is 
implied only that we must keep them in the 
right relative proportions. The contrast is 
drawn to emphasize the assertion that our 

30 



CHILD AND CHURCH 

biggest business is to build Christian char- 
acter in ourselves and in our children. All 
other worthy ends must be related to that 
and not allowed to take precedence. It is a 
calamity when we miss the main end of life 
and follow a side issue. Very few will dis- 
pute this position, but too few make it a 
working principle in their everyday lives. 
If parents can be brought to realize the reli- 
gious possibilities of the child and learn to 
work out those possibilities, much will be 
gained every way. We must preach con- 
servation even more emphatically than we 
preach reclamation. "Keep the children," 
should be the keynote of all our preaching. 



31 



CHAPTER II 

THE MISSION OF THE LITTLE 
CHILD 



And there shall come forth a shoot out of the 
stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots shall 
bear fruit. And the spirit of Jehovah shall rest 
upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, 
the spirit of council and might, the spirit of knowl- 
edge and of the fear of Jehovah. And his delight 
shall be in the fear of Jehovah; and he shall not 
judge after the sight of his eyes, neither decide 
after the hearing of his ears; but with righteous- 
ness shall he judge the poor, and decide with equity 
for the meek of the earth; and he shall smite the 
earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the 
breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And 
righteousness shall be the girdle of his waist, and 
faithfulness the girdle of his loins. 

And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and 
the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the 
calf and the young lion and the fatling together; 
and a little child shall lead them. And the cow 
and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall 
lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw 
like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on 
the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall 
put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not 
hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the 
earth shall be full of the knowledge of Jehovah, 
as the waters cover the sea. — Isa. 11. 1-9, 



CHAPTER II 

THE MISSION OF THE LITTLE 
CHILD 

It surely will be no reflection on the true 
doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures 
to say that often the words of the prophets 
are more far-reaching than they themselves 
knew. Moved by the Spirit of God, they 
have uttered some profound truth concern- 
ing human events, but, meeting its imme- 
diate intent, the prophecy has swept on and 
out and has reached vastly larger realms 
than they in the nature of the case could 
have foreseen. Truth is eternal and springs 
from the very nature of God himself. A 
truth meeting one condition in one age will 
quite surely have application to phases of 
life in all ages. ,The prophets saw the situa- 
tion immediately involved in their pro- 
nouncements and had indeed marvelous out- 
look toward the future, but the eternal 
truths to which they have in some cases given 

35 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

expression have outreaehed even their 
fondest expectations. This will be found 
true, I believe, of the prophecy of Isaiah 
which I have quoted on the preceding page 
and which forms the basis for succeeding 
thought. The prophet was applying a great 
truth to a particular setting, and because 
truth is eternal it is not exhausted in use, but 
is, rather, accentuated and expands more 
fully with the years. I would not agree 
with those exegetes who see in this prophecy 
only the possibility of a literal fulfillment, 
and assume that, among other things, our 
Lord's influence is to extend to the animal 
world and eventually work out an equilib- 
rium among all his creatures. It may be 
that such an equilibrium is yet to be; that 
some day the lion, the wolf, and the leopard, 
together with the cockatrice and the asp, 
will be so transformed in nature as to elim- 
inate all possibility of struggle and conflict, 
and that man will become so saintly that he 
will be in harmony with everything in crea- 
tion; that the animal of the jungle will be so 
transformed as to be a safe playmate for 
our children, and man will have no aversion 
to the so-called lower animals, but will re- 

36 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

ceive them as companions. This is conceiv- 
able under God's infinite power. It is rather 
enchanting to think of a great process of 
evolution working in all the universe by the 
power of God which is destined to eliminate 
all friction from the earth; but to stop here 
is to fall far short of the concept of the great 
prophet and to forestall the great onsweep- 
ing of the prophecy. The elevation of the 
animal world up to a plane congenial to the 
best estate of the animal in man is not the 
chief work of the Messiah. Rather and far 
more important is his mission of subduing 
the animal nature in man and making it 
subservient to the higher spiritual nature. 
The viciousness of the lion, the cruel cunning 
of the wolf, the treachery of the leopard, the 
deadly venom of the cockatrice and the asp 
are all, besides many other animal charac- 
teristics, revealed in the human heart, and 
the crowning work of the Infinite is to sub- 
iue these and harmonize the warring elements 
in the kingdom of the soul so that the peace 
of heaven may abide there. As between 
the task of conforming the animal kingdom 
to a human ideal and that of eliminating the 
animal traits from the soul of man, there is 

37 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

no common ground of comparison. One is 
entirely in the realm of the material and 
therefore wholly subject to the will of God. 
The other is in the realm of the spirit and, 
by divine appointment, not necessarily sub- 
ject to the will of God. God himself is not 
equal to this task alone, for it is such a task 
as to require the power of the Infinite and 
the power of man. Infinite power is in no 
sense taxed when dealing with the material 
universe or with the lower animal orders, 
which are all subservient to the Maker. 
He can shut the mouths of the lions and 
bring a Daniel out of the lions' den un- 
harmed if it meets his divine purpose. But 
man, by reason of the nature which God 
has invested in him, is a different type of 
subject and is not always so obedient. 

Accordingly, we would take this prophecy 
away from the material and literal and let 
it sweep out into the realm of the soul and 
find its fulfillment some great day when 
men's souls have come wholly under the 
rulership of Him who came to earth as a 
child, who sprang as a new branch from the 
cut-away stump of Israel, from the root of 
Jesse, a famished Israel. We would find 

38 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

its fulfillment in that great day when the 
song of the angels ringing on that first 
Christmas night shall be again smig when 
the Christ is born anew in the hearts of 
men, and peace and good will have come to 
abide forever. 

Christ's coming marks a new era for 
childhood. A glance over the history of 
nations shows that apart from the religion 
of the true God childhood has had little sig- 
nificance. The highest civilization of Egypt 
witnessed a Pharaoh killing hundreds of 
babes, that the enslaved Hebrew people 
might not increase too rapidly. Greece at 
her best gave little heed to the child as such, 
unless perchance he was considered an off- 
spring of the gods. Israel witnessed Herod 
slaying numerous babes in order that he 
might intervent the will of heaven and kill 
even the Christ-child. In India to this day 
the parent regards the life of the child as 
secondary to his own, and the child is left 
to perish if thereby the parent's life may be 
saved. Or perchance a Hindu mother 
would make an offering to her god. Her 
child, if it were not for the intervention of 
Christianized civil law, would be tossed to 

39 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

the sacred alligators of the Ganges or ruth- 
lessly hurled under the wheels of the Jugger- 
naut car. In China childhood has only a 
little significance, and especially is this true 
if the baby is a girl. Frequently the girl 
baby is strangled or carelessly tossed out 
into the street to die, if perchance some 
kindly hearted missionary does not pick her 
up and nourish her little life. But wherever 
the religion of Jesus the Christ has become 
a power no such scenes as these are found. 
Around the cradle of innocency, in the 
humblest home or in the gilded palace of 
wealthy parents, brothers and sisters and 
envious neighbors stand and with rapt gaze 
look lovingly upon the little messenger from 
heaven, while all that is pure and holy in 
their natures swells up with joy that a new 
soul has come fresh from the hand of God. 
Here is one thing just as God would have it, 
without spot or blemish, and bringing into a 
sordid world a new suggestion of heaven's 
love. And who can describe what a good 
mother feels when she beholds for the first 
time that which God has given to her? 
When she presses to her bosom that tiny 
bundle of humanity and hears the little voice, 

40 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

what could purchase from her that heavenly 
treasure? The unmeasured sacrifice is 
nothing now in view of the reward which it 
has brought. She has forgotten her travail 
for joy that a child is born to her. Suffer- 
ing, hunger, starvation will not compel the 
intelligent Christian mother to abandon her 
child. Nothing short of a power greater 
than her own will take it away from her. 
All this is in fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy. 
All this is because God has through Christ 
made known what parental love is. 

But Christ's work for the child and with 
the child is not all done, even in Christian 
America. We must say with Bishop Bash- 
ford that there is a wide difference between 
evangelization and Christianization. Amer- 
ica is perhaps evangelized in that we have 
heard or may hear the gospel message; but 
our beloved America is far from Christian- 
ized. Through Jesus the Christ the child is 
entitled to many more privileges than it now 
enjoys. When it shall have come, as it will 
come, that in our high social circles the 
women shall prefer the joys of motherhood 
to the glitter of the ballroom and the theater ; 
when the home circle shall have become more 

41 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

attractive than the card party; when babies 
are given preference over the pet dog ; when 
the child in the factory is something more 
than a cog in a wheel, then the prophecy of 
Isaiah shall have begun to be realized. 
When it shall have come to pass that in all 
our homes the child is considered as a sacred 
charge from heaven to be nourished and 
reared in the fear of God, to be dedicated to 
God at birth, and taught as a religious per- 
son from its earliest days, then the prophecy 
of Isaiah shall have begun to be fulfilled. 
The animal nature within us shall have been 
put into subjection and the adult will be a 
safe playmate for the child, and the poisons 
of adult impurity will not contaminate in- 
fant holiness. When the serious-minded 
person realizes something of the severity 
with which Christ condenmed the one who 
offends one of his httle ones there will be 
less carelessness with regard to the religious 
life of the child and less disregard for the 
rights of the child in our social scheme. 

A little child is a very decided factor in 
the affairs of life. Man generic is often de- 
clared to be God's chiefest work. This is 
not quite true. Not man generic, but man 

42 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

cultured and developed according to God's 
divine intention, is the noblest work of God. 
In this great plan the child is no inconsider- 
able factor in developing this highest 
product. Second to the name of Deity is 
the name "mother," God's highest creative 
achievement. The evolution of mother, be- 
sides being the most beautiful reality, is also 
the most potent social influence in our social 
life. In my home there is a series of rather 
unpretentious pictures clipped from a maga- 
zine and mounted on a card. It is to be 
regretted that they are not to be procured in 
some better form and that the artist did not 
give wider distribution to his thought. The 
pictures are entitled "Her Christmases." 
The first in the series is a little babe in the 
mother's arms. This is her "First Christ- 
mas," and very evidently the mother cher- 
ishes the little life as heaven's best gift. It 
is a Madonna, only the artist has caused the 
child to be the real center of the picture. 
The child seems to realize that it has come 
into an atmosphere of love and feels per- 
fectly at home. The next picture is that of 
a little girl of perhaps eight years, sweet and 
pure still as the little babe, surrounded by 

43 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

her playmates, who are sharing with her the 
evident surprise of a beautifully appointed 
Christmas tree. This picture is entitled 
"Her Merriest Christmas." The next is a 
maiden of sixteen sitting alone, evidently in 
a meditative mood and considering the 
Christmas occasion. She is the recipient of 
many gifts that stir deep emotions within. 
She is in that marvelous age of wonderment, 
just bidding farewell to the carefree gayeties 
of girlhood, reluctantly leaving that which 
has been so very dear to her, and yet gladly, 
if hesitatingly, turning to the responsibilities 
of womanhood. Her girlhood days have 
been very happy, but all the womanly in- 
stincts are beginning to surge within her 
and she turns hopefully to the future. This 
one is entitled "Her Sweetest Christmas." 
The next is the picture of a mother. In her 
arms is a babe; at her knee is a small child 
of perhaps three years, completely lost in 
his love for the mother and the little babe; 
near by stands a strong lad, whose divided 
attention is half given to the father, who sits 
in the background with a look of happy con- 
tentment upon his face, while his attention is 
divided between the happy family circle and 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

the book which he holds in his hand. This 
is a beautiful home circle, and the world 
holds nothing better. This picture is en- 
titled "Her Happiest Christmas." The last 
of the series is sad but inexpressively beau- 
tiful and suggestive. All alone sits an aged 
mother. There is the same beautiful face 
which we have seen all along, but now 
marked with age. This is "Her Last Christ- 
mas." If it were not almost sacrilegious, 
we might take a look into her thoughts and 
try to portray them. What sacred memo- 
ries ! What depths of reminiscent love ! We 
will not try to portray them because we 
would only fail in the attempt. Perhaps 
some day we may be able to understand what 
this aged mother feels on this her last Christ- 
mas on earth. The artist has called this 
series "Her Christmases," but I have taken 
the liberty of naming it "The Evolution of 
Mother." Not man in the abstract, but 
mother is God's best work, and childhood is 
the way God has of developing the mother. 
Without the little child the mother is an 
impossibility. The child is God's last agent 
for effecting the most beautiful refinement. 
The second best product of childhood is 

45 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

father. Only a little less decided, but cer- 
tainly as real and as necessary as the "Evo- 
lution of Mother," is the "Evolution of 
Father." Here are a young man and a young 
woman, joyous and carefree. They have 
been drawn together by that indefinable 
something implanted of God and best under- 
stood by him. Life seems to them to be a 
continuous round of joy imdisturbed and 
their one thought is of themselves. They 
are lost to the world of hard reality, and 
struggle and sacrifice have as yet little mean- 
ing. But a true home is foimded, and we 
behold them again as father and mother. 
How changed their life! Not themselves 
now but another. The father goes to his 
work with a new stride, because he is im- 
pelled by an additional motive more power- 
ful even than he has known before. Once 
he worked to satisfy chiefly his own desire 
and the necessities of the newly built home ; 
but now the true father-nature takes hold 
of him and he works to meet the need of his 
family. The boy or girl will need some- 
thing. The home must be a place of comfort 
for the mother and her child, and his chief 
joy is in contributing to their joy. The 

46 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

child will need to be educated and equipped 
for life so that life will be a little less difficult 
for him than it was for the father and 
mother, and the son may have more of life's 
advantages. Sacrifice becomes a principle 
in the parent nature, and God is doing his 
great work in the parent heart. The dross 
of selfishness that was so unconsciously there 
is being consumed. The refining power of 
love is ridding their souls of one of the sub- 
tlest of life's imperfections and adding a 
touch to the soul that nothing else will give. 
The father shudders when he hears his boy 
utter a coarse word that perchance he has 
learned from him, and he refrains from such 
words for the sake of his boy. The mother 
trembles when she sees her baby daughter, 
now approaching womanhood, walking close 
to the danger line, and will counsel and prac- 
tice very careful living for the sake of her 
daughter. The parents aspire to a better 
life for their child than they themselves 
knew, and so they strive to be better for the 
sake of the child. Isaiah is proving a true 
prophet. A little child is leading. 

In giving the father a secondary position 
the thought is not that the refining power of 

47 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

childhood makes greater demands upon the 
mother than upon the father. God calls the 
father to be as pure and good as the mother. 
But there is a quality of womanhood which 
a m^n cannot possess. It is that indefinable 
something which brings the strongest man 
to sit in profound reverence before a frail 
woman whom he calls mother; that softens 
his heart in the midst of taxing cares and 
brings a tear of fond remembrance to his 
cheek as he closes his eyes and dreams over 
childhood's days, "Mother" is a peculiar 
word which no one in all the world can de- 
fine, but when once fixed in the mind nothing 
can efface. How many mothers there are 
who simply in the capacity of mother have 
stamped themselves ineffaceably upon the 
pages of history. A woman may possess 
all the purity and nobility of a true woman, 
and still she becomes more beautiful in 
motherhood. The purest, the best, the 
greatest become purer, better, greater when 
in God's way they offer themselves and 
receive from him a gift from heaven, a price- 
less gift — an immortal soul. The cleanest, 
noblest man, with life's achievements resting 
upon him, has not reached his highest unless 

48 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

he is a father. This is the divine ideal for 
God's children, and we are not quite what 
we might have been if this holy influence has 
not done its work upon us. The man who, 
when old, may not be called father has missed 
one of life's largest blessings. The woman 
who in her declining years has none to rever- 
ence her and call her by the holy name of 
mother has missed the richest joy that life 
can give. She has not known God's finish- 
ing touches upon her character and has 
missed a profound good. Heaven and 
eternity may supply this lack, but certain it 
is that earth life apart from this relation is 
measurably incomplete. 

If we are correct in supposing that in 
some measure Isaiah's prophecy is being ful- 
filled in this process of animal subjugation, 
we have, then, a divine agency at work, 
namely, the discipline of responsibility. 
The crying need is that Christ's gospel of 
childhood be preached and taught and lived 
until everywhere the child shall be placed in 
his proper sphere. The child, according to 
nature and in Christ's declaration, is not a 
neutral something, a matter of accident 
which needs no care until he can look out 

^9 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

for himself. To inure the animal to hard- 
ship early in his life may possibly fit him 
for the hardship of burden-bearing which 
he must undertake later on. But the same 
theory certainly will not fit the moral nature 
of the child. The child may partially re- 
cover from the injuries of early neglect by 
reason of other influences applied, but that 
does not change the fact that so far as 
parenthood has been concerned in his case it 
has been a failure. The child needs the 
parent and the parent needs the child. 
There is a reciprocal influence without which 
the circle of life is very incomplete. Home 
is an anomaly without the child, society is 
empty and meaningless, and heaven itself is 
incomplete if we obliterate the thought of 
childhood. Suppose that God, in his infinite 
power, should decide to replenish the earth 
with men and women fully grown, and 
presently we should know nothing more of 
childhood either as a fact or as an ideal. 
What sort of a place would this world be- 
come? Home would be merely a place to 
stay; society would become a mockery; 
heaven would lose half its glory. Zecha- 
riah seeks to portray the beauties of the 

50 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

New Jerusalem and the crowning glory of 
his thought is that "The streets of the city 
shall be full of boys and girls playing in 
the streets thereof." Obliterate the parental 
relation and thus deprive us of the holy 
word "mother," and second to that the sacred 
word "father," and rob us of childhood and 
baby purity, and we would not long enjoy 
this world, as barren as the desert sands, no 
single flower blooming to brighten its gloom. 
O thou who didst delight in the name 
"Father," into which thou hast wrapped 
both the tenderness of our human word 
"mother" and the strength of our earthly 
conception of "father"; thou who knowest 
all the value of purity and love, teach us to 
hallow these holy relations, and to crown 
mother with richest jewels and clothe father 
with a robe of sanctity and enthrone son or 
daughter on love's throne to bind together 
firmly all our earthly loves and fit us for 
heaven's atmosphere. 

If there is happiness below. 
In such a home she's shrined; 

The human heart can never know 
Enjoyment more refined. 

The child is a religious person. A child is 

51 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

a moral possibility rather than a religious 
actuality. A child is commonly considered 
a neutral factor religiously until such a time 
as he begins to talk religion intelligently, 
and theii we are wont to assert that his moral 
nature has just begun to unfold. He has 
arrived at the years of accountability. Then 
we begin trying to "get him converted," 
and we strive to do something definite in 
his behalf. If we do not believe this we at 
least act as though we did and the result for 
the child is essentially the same. It is this 
belief — if in some cases it is a belief, or 
habit, if in other cases it is only following 
what is common without any definite belief 
— against which I wish to protest most 
vigorously and urge upon parents a more 
careful consideration of the child's religious 
nature. I repeat that a child is a religious 
person — is at birth and never loses that 
identity. We have been seeking through 
travel and the verdict of history to prove 
that man is universally religious. The 
proposition is sufficiently well established 
and generally accepted in philosophy, 
theology, history, and science in general. "I 
am satisfied that character is distinctly 

52 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

shown at the age of two or three months," 
said OHver Wendell Holmes. Let us carry 
the fact to its reasonable beginning and 
admit that the child is inherently religious. 
We have brooded so long over "inbred sin" 
and "total depravity" that they have 
crowded out the conception of the divine in 
man, and we have come to talk of the child 
as though he were the offspring of Satan 
rather than the sweetest, purest gift from 
heaven. It is high time that we should blot 
some words out of our theological vocabu- 
lary and frame a language that fittingly ex- 
presses our beliefs. We have been so 
concerned with the theology of these words 
that it has blinded us to the real religious 
nature of the child. It would be interesting, 
if it were not so much a digression from the 
main purpose, to consider in this connection 
something of the history of childhood reli- 
gion. Some references only must suffice. I 
stood one day before a large sepulcher in old 
Copps Hill Cemetery in Boston. The tomb 
differed from all the others, being consider- 
ably larger, and so it elicited some questions 
from the company of people of whom I was 
one. We were informed by the sexton that 

53 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

the tomb had been prepared in an early day, 
in the time of the Revs. John and Cotton 
Mather, to receive the bodies of all children 
who had died without having been baptized. 
The tomb contains the bodies of two hun- 
dred and twenty-eight children who were 
pronounced eternally lost by these and sub- 
sequent reverend gentlemen, whose bodies 
might not be buried beside those of their 
parents because such an act would contam- 
inate the consecrated ground; and the sole 
crime of these children was that they had 
died without having been baptized. And 
this has not been so very long ago, for Cotton 
Mather died in the year 1728. Moreover, 
it is not to be supposed that this idea passed 
away with him. It held firm place in the 
minds of great theologians for some years 
after that. I am persuaded that about the 
first vision that was granted these very 
worthy fathers was a chorus of these same 
little children singing the glad songs of 
heaven and extending a welcoming hand to 
these good men, and rejoicing that now, by 
their final emancipation from the narrow- 
ness of human thought, they are released 
from their gross ignorance and superstition. 

54 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

"Merciful God, make room for a little fel- 
low," prayed a lad who was dying and who 
had been taught after this fashion, and I 
believe God heard that prayer. Who of us 
would dare to stand before that tomb to-day 
and say that all those children are lost 
eternally because they died having not been 
baptized? Who of us would stand beside 
the casket of our own babe and feel for the 
smallest instant that there is any question of 
his acceptance with God? And all this too 
without there having been any ecclesiastical 
intervention whatever. God never spoke 
any such doctrine, and the Christ who took 
a little child in his arms and said, "To such 
belongeth the kingdom," had a right to say 
what he did and knew what he was saying. 
Shall we not recognize his teaching as 
authoritative ? Shall we not act consistently 
thereto? Dr. Rishell has well asked, "Will 
God do more for the child dead than the 
child alive?" If the babe in the casket is 
God's chosen, why is not that one in the 
mother's arms also? It is our duty to re- 
ceive the child from God's hand, and, work- 
ing in obedience to his will, help the child to 
unfold its religious nature as the sun and 

55 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

the dew and the breeze help the rose to bud 
and bloom. If blight strike the rosebud, it 
unfolds with difficulty. The parent must 
shield the budding child soul from the blight 
of sin. The child is responsive to all influ- 
ences which correspond to implanted in- 
stincts. He will respond to proper appeals 
to his religious instincts just as surely as he 
turns to his mother's breast for nourishment. 
Intelligent religious parenthood will seek to 
know those religious instincts of the child 
and will zealously apply the proper stimuli 
to them to awaken them into activity. We 
must father and mother the religious possi- 
bilities of the child just as earnestly, or even 
more earnestly, than we do the physical and 
mental possibilities. We are not to rear 
simply a physical and mental being, but also 
a religious person. 

We unthinkingly assume that because the 
child cannot reason in just our way and 
converse in our high-sounding religious 
terminology, he cannot think about God and 
truth. We are sometimes startled by the 
sudden revelations of mental currents in 
children. What parent has not been thus 
startled and sometimes greatly perplexed 

^6 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

to know how to answer the child question? 
A bright girl of six years, the daughter of 
a Methodist preacher, rather startled her 
father one day by asking concerning a cer- 
tain sermon which she had heard him preach, 
"Papa, was that the truth you were telling 
to-day, or were you just preaching?" The 
father discovered that he had a critic who 
took the liberty of even questioning the 
veracity of her father. He discovered that 
this youthful daughter was revolving over in 
her mind the things he had declared, and 
because she was having a hard time recon- 
ciling them to her own meager experiences 
she was inclined to doubt them. It was 
personally very important to him that he 
should hold that daughter's confidence in 
his knowledge and veracity and that he 
should be able to convince her that when he 
was in the pulpit he was declaring sacred 
truth. If this child mind was inquisitive, 
why may not all our children be thus inquisi- 
tive, and, therefore, how great is the re- 
sponsibility of the preacher as he stands 
before children? These thoughts sobered 
the father-preacher, as well they might, and 
he recognized as never before that "just 

57 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

preaching" is not all there is to standing in 
the pulpit. The same daughter accompanied 
her father to hear a neighboring pastor 
preach on a certain occasion. At the dinner 
table following the morning sermon the 
daughter manifested great earnestness of 
thought and finally broke into vigorous con- 
versation. Bringing her little fist down upon 
the table she declared, "I just don't under- 
stand this business." "What business?" 
asked her father. "Well, that preacher said 
that Jesus was the Son of God, and then 
turned right round and said he was the Son 
of man. I just can't understand such talk." 
That girl of six summers was wrestling with 
the problem of the incarnation even as older 
folks have done. She was thinking big 
thoughts. 

If a very personal reference may be par- 
doned, I will illustrate the thought further 
by an incident that transpired in my own 
home. One day our little boy, at that time 
four years old, was sitting on his mother's 
lap talking very intimately with her. It 
was eventime, and as he was wont at that 
hour he was in a very confidential mood. 
Suddenly breaking away from the line of 

58 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

conversation which had until then engaged 
them, he said, "Mamma, when I grow up 
you won't need two men will you?" To 
which his mamma replied: "I suppose not, 
son. Why do you ask?" "Well, then," was 
the answer, "when I get to be a big man, and 
you don't need two men, then I will go way 
over to China and tell the little heathen boys 
and girls about Jesus.'* What did this mean? 
"Nothing at all. Just a childish fancy." 
That is what most people will say, but I do 
not believe it. I think it means much. It 
means that that mother, because she was 
interested in missions and had talked sympa- 
thetically with the boy about the children 
who had never known about Jesus, had 
stimulated a very proper religious impulse 
in the child's heart. She had touched one 
of the divinely implanted springs that God 
had intended should be touched to help open 
up that child's life. It means that, in case 
we are able under God to keep that child 
heart open toward God, the Father will have 
a chance at the man's heart, and if the crying 
needs of China and the mission fields are 
kept before his youthful mind in the next 
few years as they have been in the past, that 

59 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

his heart will most likely go out in yearning 
for God's great work and he will quite likely 
hear the voice of God verifying the impulses 
of his childish mind. God help us that as 
parents we may do nothing that will thwart 
his divine purpose and forestall his leadings. 
May the Great Father help all parents to do 
their duty and let him have a chance at the 
child heart. May we make it easy for God's 
Spirit to get a hearing in the ear of the 
children. 

What, then, is the significance of these 
undercurrents of child thought that occa- 
sionally break out in such startling manifes- 
tations ? There is nothing miraculous or un- 
natural about them. It is the subconscious 
self, upon which impressions have been made, 
becoming the conscious self and assuming 
control. The child soul is very impres- 
sionable and is constantly being affected by 
the atmosphere in which it lives, and these 
outbursts of thought are simply the evi- 
dences of these impressions. The child mind 
is bringing forth of those things which it 
has in store. But these impressions are of 
the greatest importance because some of 
them are lasting. It is not imcommon for 

60 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

our great religious leaders to remember these 
early impressions as the beginning of their 
distinctive call to religious work. There can 
be no reason to doubt that many a mother 
has been used of God to assist him in 
fixing the call to definite religious work in 
the mind of the child. A case is known to 
the writer of a mother whose early desire 
was to go to the mission field. That was 
her intention, and as a girl she prepared her- 
self for that work. But when she was ready 
to go the Mission Board could not send her 
for some reason, and she was compelled to 
enter religious work at home. Later she 
became a wife and mother. To-day her 
seven children are all in distinctively reli- 
gious work, some filling prominent pulpits, 
while three are in the mission field. Who 
shall say that the consuming desire of that 
mother had nothing to do with her children's 
call to the work? The writer's own experi- 
ence verifies this same principle, if he may 
be allowed to relate it. When a lad of eight 
years I joined the church on my own motion 
and without extra persuasion, except that a 
revival meeting was in progress and that 
many were being converted. At that time I 

61 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

had a distinct conception that when I became 
a man I would become a preacher. It was 
no ideahzing or following after a youthful 
hero, but a distinct inward conviction. I do 
not hesitate to say that even then I had "a 
call to the ministry." I said nothing about 
it for fear of being teased. (May some 
superior wisdom help us not to tease chil- 
dren about these sacred things.) Later in 
life, as I came to be about eighteen, I de- 
cided that I would not preach, but would 
fit myself for the profession of law. I was 
religious still, and all the time had a con- 
sciousness of what God wanted me to do, 
but was rebellious about it. Finally, during 
a series of special services, I was led to 
consecrate myself to whatever service God 
wanted. I went home from that service to 
tell my mother what I had done, supposing 
that it would all be news to her. When I 
told her she calmly but with very deep feel- 
ing said, "Well, I knew you would do it. 
I consecrated you to the service of God on 
the day of your birth. You were my eighth 
son, and I thought out of so many surely I 
ought to have one who would be especially 
a servant of God and the church." Let all 

62 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

disparage these influences who may so de- 
sire, but I for one prefer to give them their 
full credit. I cannot escape the conviction 
that this thought, having been thus fixed in 
the mother, found expression in her life in 
various ways, consciously or imconsciously, 
and thus influenced my subconscious self, 
and all this apart from the power of my 
mother's prayer. There is a reciprocal and 
psychological action here as well as a direct 
answer to prayer, in both of which I heartily 
believe. I wish, however, to emphasize the 
first condition, because if we neglect that, we 
make it quite hard for God to answer our 
prayers. We ask God to bless and use our 
children, while possibly we are doing little 
to make the answer to the prayer possible. 
We can touch the divinely implanted springs 
in the child soul and help him to unfold 
them. God expects us to do our part in 
giving him access to the soul. 

Thus the child assumes its natural posi- 
tion in Christ. It comes from God and its 
nature is godlike. Its soul is not sin-tainted 
but pure as heaven itself. Its Christlike 
nature responds to every Christlike minis- 
tration. If only we can get away from our 

63 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

careless moments and wisely determine the 
impressions our children shall receive, we 
will have helped the Divine by so much in 
shaping the future. Dr. W. B. Inge, pro- 
fessor of divinity at Cambridge, has force- 
fully summed up this general idea in the 
following words: "It is certain that in indi- 
vidual experience authority is the earliest 
ground of belief. We are none of us born 
with a belief in God; but we are all born 
with a tendency to believe what we are told. 
A child can be made to believe almost any- 
thing. He does not believe because he 
wishes to believe, or because the things pre- 
sented to him for acceptance appear to him 
to be useful or beautiful or desirable in any 
way. He is quite as ready to believe in 
ghosts and hobgoblins as in angels and good 
fairies. As he began to speak by parrot 
talk, so he begins to think by accepting facts 
without criticizing them, and assumes that 
whatever he hears and understands has a 
place in the world of reality. It is only after 
sad experience of the deceitfulness of ap- 
pearances that he unlearns his first confi- 
dence, and begins to doubt and question and 
disbelieve." Thus we see the nature with 

64 



1 



MISSION OF THE CHILD 

which God invests the child. Rest assured 
the Father is doing all in his power for his 
httle child and expects us to do our part. 
The subconscious nature of the child is 
being molded by us now, but one day it will 
assume control of the child. The largest 
and most potent influences will be planted 
in the subconscious nature of the child. 
Thank God for good fathers and mothers! 
Thank God for the church and the Sunday 
school and godly men and women! These 
are indeed the chief agencies in molding the 
men and women of the future. We cannot 
be too careful in selecting the material that 
goes to make up the web of the delicate 
child soul either to mar or make it of sur- 
passing beauty. The home atmosphere, the 
church atmosphere, the playmates, what we 
say to the child in its earliest years, what we 
do not speak before the child that we should 
speak, how we act before the child — all these 
things are determining factors in the child 
life. Why not speak good things to the 
child rather than merely amusing things? 
Why not steep the little mind with things 
that you will wish him to retain and will be 
glad to see unfold later on rather than things 

65 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

which he must unlearn? Such teaching is 
well worth our while, and to neglect it is to 
neglect our greatest opportunity as parents. 
What, then are the demands of the child's 
religious life? Remembering that the child 
is naturally religious but without fixed be- 
liefs, we discover that there is great need of 
care and careful training. As parents we 
are to discover the God-implanted instincts 
and so encourage them with proper stimula- 
tion that they will respond and awaken and 
lead the child in the right direction. The 
child has a right to a religious opportunity. 
The rose makes its demands, which being 
denied, it will never bloom. Child nature 
makes its demands, and if they are denied 
in part or as a whole, a dwarfed product at 
best is all that can be obtained. We must 
come to regard the child as Christ regarded 
him, and, recognizing the delicate nature of 
the task, strive manfully to do the blessed 
work that God has placed in our hands. 
We have the tools and the material. Let us 
study to be workmen that need not to be 
ashamed, always remembering that it were 
better for us that we had not been born than 
that we should offend one of his little ones. 

6Q 



CHAPTER III 
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 



And they were bringing unto him little children, 
that he should touch them: and the disciples re- 
buked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was moved 
with indignation, and said unto them, Suffer the 
little children to come unto me; forbid them not: 
for to such belongeth the kingdom of God. Verily 
I say unto you. Whosoever shall not receive the 
kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no 
wise enter therein. And he took them in his 
arms, and blessed them, laying his hands upon 
them.— MarA: 10. 13-16. 

. . . the innocents alarmed 
Amid the throng of faces all unknown. 
Shrink trembling, till their wandering eyes discern 
The countenance of Jesus, beaming love 
And pity; eager then they stretch their arms. 
And, cowering, lay their heads upon his breast. 

— James Grahame, 

"O, the trusting, sweet confiding ^ 
Of the child heart! Would that I 
Thus might trust my heavenly Father, 
He who hears my feeblest cry." 



CHAPTER III 

HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

Life is complex, being composed of 
numerous factors. It is impossible in any 
case to analyze life completely and separate 
it into all its component parts. We cannot 
trace with absolute certainty many result- 
ants to their initial causes since various in- 
fluences and forces overlap and intermingle 
so that it is impossible to completely differ- 
entiate them. We have accustomed our- 
selves, however, to some general classifica- 
tions which serve a purpose and enable us 
to identify influences and thus make a more 
careful study than would otherwise be pos- 
sible. Character is a resultant of three 
major factors — heredity, environment, and 
choice. No one can draw a clear line of 
distinction between them, indicating just 
where one leaves off and the other begins. 
No one can tell how heredity and environ- 
ment have affected choice, and in turn no 

69 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

one can tell to what extent environment may 
be the result of choice. The respective in- 
fluences that we classify under these heads 
blend into each other, and it is impossible to 
make a scientific classification of all the 
various threads of influence that have come 
to make up the great chain of life. So, 
then, in using these commonly recognized 
classifications there is no thought of being 
arbitrary and of forcing certain influences 
into one class and others into another or of 
attempting to distinguish clearly between 
these various realms as though they were 
very specific. We use them merely as aids 
to our thought and not as a final and com- 
plete analysis. We are not at all concerned 
about the classification, but desire very 
earnestly to understand the workings of the 
various influences so as to make an intel- 
ligent use of them in the religious training 
of children. Child life will surely move 
along certain lines, and the more we can 
learn about the lines along which the child 
life will surely go, the better able will we be 
to assist properly in directing it. We will 
find on careful study that these forces are of 
such a character that we can intelligently 

70 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

conform the environment in relation to the 
heredity and bring them to bear upon the 
child life with a desired resultant in view. 

The accompanying chart is intended to 
assist us in fixing more firmly some prin- 
ciples which work in the religion of childhood 
by inducing us to use both our eyes and 
our ears. It is a very simple diagram, or 
perhaps we might better say two simple 
diagrams combined into one chart. The 
parallelogram has to do with both illustra- 
tions. The heavy line curving across the 
chart called A Pathway of Life is the chief 
feature of the first. This line is designed to 
represent a resultant of two forces, heredity 
and environment, operating simultaneously 
upon the life of a child. The parallelogram 
divided into sections is intended to represent 
the relative natural divisions in child de- 
velopment. This manifestly cannot be arbi- 
trary because children differ; but it has a 
value as an approximation. From one to 
five years is the infancy period, or the age 
in which the child is impelled largely by 
instinct. Somewhere near five years the 
moral consciousness begins to unfold and 
the child begins to do things from the stand- 

71 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

point of reason. Therefore from five to 
twelve is called the intelligent period, or the 
time when intelligence comes into control. 
From twelve to eighteen there takes place 
the great transformation, physically and 
mentally and morally, which causes this age 
to be called the adolescent period. Beyond 
this we have not attempted to go, and, ac- 
cordingly, we have left the chart open toward 
maturity, indicating that we are not attempt- 
ing to follow the lines of influence clear 
through to the end. We are seeking to deal 
only with childhood. As the child gradually 
passes from one stage to another the element 
of choice increases in f orcef ulness and should 
be the one predominating force at maturity. 
As a matter of fact, many people in ma- 
turity are not controlled by intelligent 
choice, as they should be, but are still 
creatures impelled by external influences, as 
in childhood. Doubtless we are all susceptible 
of influences in all our years, but it is mani- 
festly the divine intention that intelligent 
choice should play the predominating part. 
I have called this chart Life's Parallelo- 
gram of Forces. The idea of the chart had 
its rise in a very simple experiment in ele- 

72 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 




73 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

mentary physics, known as the parallelo- 
gram of forces. Let the rectangular figure 
of the chart represent the top of a table and 
you will have the experiment before you. 
At one corner of the table are arranged two 
flat springs, set one parallel to the side of 
the table and the other parallel to the end 
of the table and therefore at right angles to 
each other. These springs are so arranged 
as to be set and discharged either one at a 
time or both simultaneously and the dis- 
charged springs will roll a small marble 
across the table. The direction of this ball 
is determined by the amount of force ex- 
pended relatively by each spring. Set one 
spring alone so as to strike the ball and the 
ball will travel in a course at right angles to 
the base of the spring. Set both springs at 
equal tension and discharge them simul- 
taneously, and the ball will travel in a line 
bisecting the angle made by the lines drawn 
through the base of the springs, or at an 
angle of 45 degrees, being influenced equally 
by each force and dividing the difference 
between the two. Set one spring at eight 
ounces and the other at four ounces and dis- 
charge them simultaneously, and the re- 

74 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

sultant will be in the ratio of two to one, 
or 60 degrees to 30 degrees. Accordingly, 
any desired resultant may be obtained by 
determining the relative force to be applied 
in each direction. Increase one spring above 
the other and the resultant pathway wiU be 
bent in that direction. Now let one of these 
springs represent Heredity and the other 
Environment, as indicated on the chart. 
The element of choice we leave out because 
we are dealing with childhood in its earliest 
days when choice is at most a very small 
factor. Let the marble, placed in position 
ready to be sent on its way by the force of 
the springs, represent the life of a child just 
launched upon the pathway which it is to 
travel. Heredity is a force to be considered. 
Environment is a force to be reckoned with. 
Can we modify these forces and obtain a 
desired resultant or are they fixed principles 
determining the child life with fatalistic 
surety? Every child begins life with these 
great forces bearing upon him. In a given 
case what will be the resultant? Manifestly, 
the early steps of the child will be determined 
by these forces and the relative pressure of 
one against the other will cause the life to 

75 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

travel in a line which is determined by these 
relative pressures. If we have a desired 
objective point in mind for the child and can 
in some degree influence these forces, we 
can by that assistance help the life to arrive 
at the desired destination. 

Much discussion is occasioned often be- 
cause we fail to understand each other's 
position and use words which do not convey 
the same meaning to all. "Heredity" and 
"environment" are words which different 
people invest with different meanings. I 
think it will be well for me to make plain, 
if I can, what I conceive these forces to be, 
and then in future use of them seek to con- 
fine myself to that conception. This I will 
endeavor to do. What is heredity? Hered- 
ity is a biological law according to which a 
parent transmits something of his own 
nature to his offspring. This is the simplest 
definition that I have been able to find. 
Notice, heredity is a biological law. Many 
people upon hearing the word "heredity" 
entangle it with moral laws and soon have 
it so involved that it is devoid of intelligent 
meaning for them. Heredity proper has 
nothing to do with morals. It is not a bad 

76 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

principle of which we are to be afraid and 
which we are to seek to eliminate from 
human nature. It is a divinely implanted 
law, and only its neglect and abuse have 
brought it into disrepute. Heredity has to 
do with the physical self only. The new- 
born soul is God's handiwork and is there- 
fore perfect. The human machinery through 
which the soul must express itself may be 
badly affected by heredity, and because we 
in this life allow the flesh to command the 
soul so often, heredity working on the flesh 
may lay the foundations for evil acts and 
thus come indirectly to have a moral bear- 
ing. But we cannot properly say that a 
result of the law of heredity is one with the 
law itself. Heredity may be employed to 
lay the foundations for good deeds just as 
surely as for evil. For this reason we want 
an intelligent understanding of the law 
which the Divine has implanted in our 
physical natures and which he wants us to 
use for good instead of allowing it to work 
evil against the divine will. 

Manifestly, there is a law according to 
which a parent tends to transmit his own 
likeness to his children. I need not dwell 

77 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

on this at length. Color of hair and eyes, 
the shape of the ears and the nose; in short, 
the general type of the parent is often per- 
petuated in the children. We expect our 
children to be measurably like us, and are 
disappointed if this likeness is not marked. 
These family resemblances and mannerisms 
go down for many generations, as is evi- 
denced by comparison of family portraits 
and family records. Nor is the likeness 
limited to physical characteristics. Tem- 
peraments are handed down from one gen- 
eration to another through a long line of 
descendants. All this is very well known. 
We have said that heredity itself is not a 
moral law, but that does not preclude the 
possibility of the results of this law, as it lays 
a foundation upon which our moral natures 
must act. 

Most of our mature accomplishments are 
acquired. The little babe cannot do many 
things. He is a bundle of instincts, which, 
being stimulated, cause him to practice some 
simple movements until he acquires dex- 
terity. He wants his thumb in his mouth, 
and for some time he is not real sure whether 
it will arrive at his mouth or in his eye. Give 

78 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

him time to practice and he will be able to 
find his mouth very readily. Now, heredity 
did not impel him to put his thumb in his 
mouth probably, but it did help him to decide 
whether he preferred his right or his left 
thumb. Native instinct which is common to 
all impelled him, and after a while he will 
have coordinated his nerves and muscles so 
that they will work together, and he will be 
able to do something well. He will have 
acquired a habit. So throughout life our 
nerves and muscles respond within limits to 
the demands which we make of them repeat- 
edly. You watch a skillful smith drawing 
out a piece of steel. It looks very easy, and 
you understand the theory of steel working 
perfectly. All there is to it is to bring the 
steel up to a certain temperature and then 
hammer it into the desired shape. Yes, that 
is all; but you take this smith's hammer 
and go to work, and you will find that while 
your brain may know enough still your arm 
is untrained. You cannot readily do that 
which seems so easy for the skilled mechanic. 
You observe a carpenter dressing a board, 
and it looks very simple just to run that 
sharp plane up and down the board, smooth- 

79 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

ing oflp all the rougH places. Anybody 
ought to be able to run a plane. Try it and 
see. Your arm will probably fail to har- 
monize with your brain or nerve centers, 
and you will dig more holes in the board 
than you smooth out. A musician sits down 
at a piano and his fingers glide over the 
keys so lightly that your eye can scarcely 
follow the movements, and so rapidly do 
they move that it is impossible for the musi- 
cian himself to think out each separate 
movement. How does he do it? He has 
developed his nerve centers somewhere so 
nicely that they take care of the movements 
without the necessity of individual thought 
for each movement. This is simple physi- 
ology, and well known and commonplace, 
but it is also very significant for our thought. 
We discover that the brain and the nerve 
centers of these men who are skilled in some 
line that requires thought and develops 
dexterity are somewhat different from the 
same organs in the ignorant and unlearned. 
Because of the demand for enlarged nerve 
centers the brain must have more surface 
for the distribution of the gray matter, and 
so we find the brain convolving or folding 

80 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

over itself more pronouncedly on the part of 
the thoughtful man than on the part of the 
man with idle mind. Things done repeat- 
edly, therefore, have an effect upon the 
physical formation of the brain and tend to 
perpetuate themselves. It is easier for us 
to do the second time what we have once 
done and so on until habit is formed. 

Now, this is the point for our considera- 
tion in this connection: may not the parent 
transmit his brain formations to his child to 
a certain extent and thus predispose the 
child to act as he acts? If our physiologists 
are right in their observations of the brain, 
and their conclusions that all action springs 
from certain specific nerve centers; and if 
certain acts tend to conform the brain and 
become permanent, leading to habit with the 
parent, why may not the parent transmit to 
the child a brain pattern like his own just as 
well as a skull shaped like his or a general 
physical type like the father's? If we 
measurably affect the color of the eyes and 
hair, the complexion, the build, the manner 
of walking — all these familiar inheritances 
— why may we not also have something to 
do with perpetuating these brain forma- 

81 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

tions, bringing the child into the world 
already inclined toward certain actions? 
There go a father and son. They walk al- 
most exactly alike. How comes this to be 
true? The father's motions are controlled 
by certain nerve centers, the physiologist 
tells us. So also are the son's, and the nerve 
centers must be similarly organized to pro- 
duce so similar movements. How respon- 
sible is the father for transmitting that pre- 
disposed nerve center? Clearly, there is a 
relation. How intimate is the relation no 
one can say exactly. But heredity has done 
this — this biological law of which we are 
speaking, and this is what heredity does,^ 
and this is all that heredity does. It pre- 
disposes the animal foundation through 
which the soul must express itself to move 
in a certain way. It becomes moral only 
as it eventually involves a moral action. But 
this is no small matter. It is large enough, 
for the parent who comprehends all that is 
involved in this will surely think twice 
before he forms a habit that will tend to 
work toward evil results in his son. It has 
been said that if you would pick a man, you 
must first pick his grandfather. In this very 

82 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

democratic age we do not quite like to apply 
this rule to men, but it is true in part at least. 
We apply it to the lower animals for more 
than two generations, and it holds in man 
as truly, only that man has more power of 
recovery than has the unreasoning animal 
and may regain what his father has lost. 
There seems to be no valid reason, there- 
fore, why the brain and nerve centers may 
not take their shape after the parents just 
as well as any other physical feature. This 
being true, we find that the physical founda- 
tion for our conduct is a subject worthy of 
our most careful study. Deeds springing 
first from inherent impulse, and hence inno- 
cent, come to have a moral aspect. It is 
well to know what prompts us to do the 
things which we do. If we have inherited a 
tendency to move in a given direction, or if 
we observe that our children have inherited 
a tendency to move in a certain direction, 
we will be called upon to foster that tendency 
if it be good or to eradicate it if it be evil. 
We are also called upon to see to it that we 
transmit only the good. 

It is observed that children of a musician 
are rather more likely to become musicians, 

83 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

or at least to evidence musical genius, than 
the children of the unmusical. The children 
of a mechanic are usually of a mechanical 
turn. These are commonly observed facts; 
but carry them on a little further and into 
slightly different realms. The child of a 
drunkard is likely to have predisposed tastes 
in that direction, which if once aroused, are 
hard to suppress. The father who uses 
tobacco makes it more probable that his son 
will follow in his steps. Some illustrations 
will emphasize this fact. In a certain county- 
seat town in Iowa there was a school super- 
intendent who used tobacco. He had one 
small son, who at the age of four years got 
hold of a cigar and was endeavoring to 
smoke it. The father thought he would 
cure him of such tricks, and so he sat 
him upon a chair and lighted the cigar 
for him and commanded him to smoke it, 
supposing, of course, that a few puffs 
would make him very sick and cure him 
of his desire for tobacco. To the dismay 
of the father, however, the lad very calmly 
smoked the cigar all up and politely asked 
for another. Evidently, he had enjoyed the 
cigar without the least suggestion of nausea 

84 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

which usually follows in such cases. That 
lad never would have any trouble in using 
tobacco, and why? Because he had come 
into the world immune to nicotine poison. 
A certain man who is the father of seven 
sons, all of whom use tobacco, rather pro- 
tested against some remarks made by a 
preacher about parental influence in this par- 
ticular. He declared that he quit using 
tobacco in the home and carefully taught 
his boys to avoid it, but in spite of his ex- 
ample and precept every boj^ seemed to take 
to it naturally. Surely — and why? Because 
he did not quit in time to get the habit out 
of his nature before he became a father, and, 
taking his own story for the case, he had 
doubtless predisposed his sons in that direc- 
tion. In a town where I was once pastor 
there lives a greatly afflicted child. Upon 
inquiry, I learned that the child was born 
while both parents were addicted to the use 
of morphine, and the child is drunk with 
that drug all the time, and will be so long 
as she lives. She herself knows nothing of 
the drug, but acts just like one who is under 
the influence of morphine. The father is 
dead, and the mother, a very intellectual 

85 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

woman, is taking the best of care of her 
afflicted daughter; but there is no cure for 
this outworking of the biological law which 
we are studying. Her nerve centers are 
organized after the pattern of her parents 
when they gave her life, and she persists 
in being controlled by those same nerves. 

What, then, are the logical conclusions 
concerning these facts? There are at least 
two: 1. The parent should be a well-trained 
individual. 2. We should think of our 
attainments not alone as something which 
we may enjoy, but also as something which 
we may transmit to our children. The 
parent should cultivate only those qualities 
which he wishes to perpetuate in his child, 
and should seek to eliminate from his own 
character all those things which he does not 
desire to hand down to his posterity. No 
act or thought should be allowed to become 
a part of our lives that we would dislike to 
see developing in our child. We ought to 
give as much attention to the ancestry of our 
children as we do to our driving horses, our 
cattle, and our hogs. The laws which govern 
the development of our fine stock are just 
as operative in the production of boys and 

86 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

girls. We do not expect track horses from 
Norman stock, nor beef cattle from Jersey 
breeds, nor pork from Missom*i "Elm 
Peelers." Neither do we expect the best 
sort of children from parents who dissipate 
any power of mind or body. But we must 
not dwell too much upon this phase of our 
subject lest we be diverted from our main 
purpose. The question proper is this : Given 
a child already possessing the impress of 
heredity, some elements working for good 
and some for evil, what course shall we 
follow to further develop the good which 
heredity has preserved and at the same time 
eliminate that which is evil? This is to be 
our chief consideration, and while we realize 
that it is a great question, we will neverthe- 
less attempt to discuss it with a view to help- 
fulness to those who may study with us. If 
we have recognized the fact as it is, and note 
the possibilities in the case, we are better 
able to deal with it than otherwise. 

Plainly, the force which we must balance 
against the power of heredity to conserve 
the good and destroy the evil is the influence 
of environment. By environment we mean 
all influences which have their rise external 

§7 1 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

to self ; influences which arise from our social, 
educational, business, and religious life. We 
are necessarily subjected to influences from 
these sources. No man liveth to himself, 
and if he could isolate himself from his 
fellow men he would still be influenced by 
the natural conditions surrounding him, and 
his conduct and hence his character would 
be influenced thereby. We usually take 
what comes by way of environment as a 
matter of course, so that with most people 
the ultimate effect is determined by accident 
rather than reason. This need not and 
should not be the case. The parent cannot 
wholly determine the child's environment, 
but he may have much to do with it — much 
more than the average parent does. If he 
will give his attention to it, he may correct 
some very objectionable features of his 
child's surroundings, even to the extent of 
changing communities if need be, because 
the child character is more important than 
social or business advantage. The father 
can well afford to make something of a 
financial sacrifice, if in so doing he can better 
the surroundings of his children. If a man 
have an ideal of life toward which he wishes 

88 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

to direct the life of his child, he may to a 
very large extent determine for and create 
around the child certain influences which will 
tend toward that desired end. 

A certain father, known to the writer, has 
three daughters. A very unfortunate sick- 
ness robbed these girls of their mother, a 
woman of unusual personality, who had im- 
pressed herself quite definitely upon her 
daughters, though they were still mere chil- 
dren when she was taken away. The father 
and mother had together held highest ideals 
for their children, and the father, after being 
deprived of the mother's help, determined 
still to carry out the ideals of the home. He 
wanted his girls each to have a good educa- 
tion and the development that comes with a 
good college course. Accordingly, he talked 
education to the girls from childhood. He 
kept the thought before them constantly, 
and in all their plans this one thing was 
uppermost and the one end toward which 
business and social plans were bent. The 
father outlined their high school course with 
them with reference to their college course 
and never allowed them to get their eyes off 
the completion of their college work. As a 

89 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

result of this fixing of home influences and 
determining of environment, those girls are 
moving easily and naturally in the direction 
outlined. They have scarce thought of any- 
thing else than that they were going to col- 
lege and master the course offered. 

This is a good illustration of what can be 
done in this regard. Many more homes 
might be doing this if only they would give 
it the time and effort. It requires that we 
shall make the desired end very definite and 
enforce that thing with every opportunity. 
Many a life has been molded by wise con- 
duct on the part of the parents, who, recog- 
nizing certain possible results from a very 
undesirable environment, have purposely 
formed environment to meet the needs of the 
child. Thus environment is a force that may 
be regulated to a very considerable extent 
and molded perceptibly in accordance with 
our wishes. For the very young child en- 
vironment may be made largely a matter of 
the home circle. Wherever environment, ex- 
ternal to the home circle, cannot be changed 
materially, still those elements under the 
control of the parents may be regulated and 
made to play the larger part in the develop- 

9Q 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

ment of the child's Hfe until he can be so 
trained that he will reject the objectionable 
and use the good. Thus by parents con- 
trolling the home influence they can deter- 
mine the largest factor in early environment. 
As a matter of fact, they can go far beyond 
the home, as we shall see as we proceed with 
this discussion. 

Given heredity, then, as a fixed force in 
the life, what shall we do with the force of 
environment to make the outcome what we 
desire? We are starting with the little child 
for whom the parents have done all they can 
by transmitted influence. They have in- 
vested him with tendencies good and bad. 
We desire that the resultant of that life shall 
be a certain fixed goal. How shall we bend 
the young life so that it will arrive in its 
pathway at the place desired? This is the 
big problem before us as parents and church 
workers. God has given a soul into our 
hands to mold after an ideal which he has 
been teaching us. It is serious business, the 
very biggest work we have to do. 

With this preliminary explanation of 
these two forces clearly in mind, we are now 

91 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

ready for a study of the chart. Let one 
spring represent heredity working in a cer- 
tain direction as indicated by the arrow, and 
let the other spring represent environment 
working at right angles to the spring of 
heredity, and it will serve to illustrate the 
way in which we must work seeking to 
regulate the pathway of life and to accom- 
plish a desired resultant. One phase of the 
chart illustration needs to be qualified in 
order to be true. In the experiment in 
physics from which the illustration comes 
both forces are constants and the value of 
each may be determined from the beginning. 
The force of heredity, as we have said, is a 
constant, but environment is a variable. At 
birth there are wrapped up within the child 
all the tendencies which heredity can impart. 
They will gradually unfold and reveal them- 
selves, and sometimes one will appear as a 
new force; but if it is an hereditary force, 
manifestly it is unfolding from within the 
life itself. So the resultant of heredity is a 
straight line. That is to say, if there were 
no law operating on the life except heredity, 
it would follow in the line of ancestry abso- 
lutely. This is largely true of our animals. 

92 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

Given their ancestry, we know reasonably 
well what they are going to be. But mani- 
festly human nature is different. We are 
the same as to animal foundation, but that 
life principle which gives us superiority 
over the lower orders of animals also magni- 
fies the principle of personality and makes 
possible a larger divergence from the orig- 
inal. There are other forces brought to 
bear upon man. But the force of environ- 
ment, which is a variable, may be increased 
in some particulars and reduced in others, 
and thus be made to yield a greater deflec- 
tion continually, so that the resultant of 
these forces working together on the same 
life will be a curved path something hke the 
dark line of the chart, the curvature of which 
will be determined by the relative strength 
of the two forces. It may be that instead 
of the dark line, which we will suppose 
represents the ideal, the life will follow one 
of these other paths, according to conditions. 
Notice especialty that an increase of the 
force of environment early in the develop- 
ment of the curve has a far greater deter- 
mining force than when applied later. This 
is one of the points which I wish the chart 

93 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

to impress. The curved line is a segment of 
an ellipse, and a deflection at the point of 
greatest curvature has much more effect 
than at any other point. Thus a direction 
given to the infant life is vastly more effec- 
tive than at any other period in life. The 
best time and the easiest time to determine 
the resultant of the combined forces of life 
is at the earliest possible moment when a 
little direction means so much. This, there- 
fore, is a plea to the parents to study the 
early environment of their children, and 
to determine some things for their children 
which, if undetermined, will come in a more 
or less accidental way, but if determined 
properly, will practically assure the desired 
ultimate outcome. Our greatest weakness 
as Protestants to-day is our wanton neglect 
of the religion of our children. When will 
we arouse ourselves to some saner method 
of preventing the loss which is so apparent 
and so painful to us all? 

The child is susceptible to external influ- 
ences at the earliest moment. The child is a 
soul, and there is wrapped up within him a 
subconscious nature as impressionable as 
wax, upon which the parent will make deep 

94 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

impressions and upon which the wise parent 
will desire to make only the right impres- 
sions. That little bundle of humanity, which 
a few hours ago was so susceptible to pre- 
natal influences, is now only a little less 
impressionable. We are gentle with the 
mother, very properly for her sake and for 
the child's sake, but we must remember that 
the child's impressionable self has changed 
but little at birth. It is still quick to receive 
any impression. Shall we say that it makes 
no difference into what atmosphere this little 
soul comes ? Shall we say that, so far as the 
intelligence and disposition are concerned, 
the first six months or a year might just as 
well be spent in one environment as another? 
Personally, I must declare my belief that the 
first six months of a child's life will have a 
very decided bearing on his whole childhood 
and hence his life. His nervous mother can 
jolt and trot a nervous temperament into 
him regardless of his naturally rugged con- 
stitution. Or given a nervous disposition, 
a little sensible handling may help very 
materially to correct that defect, and cer- 
tainly very much more rapidly now than at 
any later period. This fact makes it im- 

95 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

possible to distinguish very sharply between 
heredity and environment. 

There can be no doubt that we often 
attribute certain traits to heredity which 
have been trained into the child rather than 
born in him. The system of nursing chil- 
dren which modern high social life demands 
without doubt often reproduces the nurse 
character as much as the mother character. 
Very early in life the child will begin to 
reciprocate the smiles of his mother's face, 
and just as surely will feel the reflex in- 
fluence of her tired and cross looks. Some 
mothers are compelled to work so hard that 
they have little of their better self to give 
to their children. But pity the child whose 
mother allows social functions of any sort to 
sap her vitality until she has nothing but 
cross looks and curt replies for her child. 
Will not his disposition most surely be 
affected thereby? The child upon whom 
genuine affection is lavished will certainly 
respond with affection, and the tendency will 
be to develop a loving and gentle nature. 
The reverse of this is equally true. The 
child who never has affectionate treatment 
is likely to be rather cold in his temperament. 

96 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

Now, these are common observations, but 
they serve to illustrate a principle that goes 
even deeper than the matter of affections. 
Just as the child will receive these material 
and temperamental impressions long before 
he is conscious of what they involve, so also 
will he receive religious impressions. In- 
deed, we may say that these temperamental 
qualities are moral because they become the 
foundation for action that after a while 
comes to have moral significance. There 
never has been a greater heresy preached 
than that we should do nothing religiously 
for the child until he is able to choose for 
himself. 

Some parents assume to be very liberal 
and broad, and do not desire to predetermine 
some things for their child. They do not 
wish to prejudice the child. They forget 
that it is their chief business to prejudice 
the child very decidedly in favor of religion, 
and if they do not do it, the forces of evil 
will be very busy prejudicing the child 
against the good and in favor of the evil. 
What has God given the child parents for 
if not to secure proper direction for youth- 
ful feet? "It is a mistake to suppose that 

97 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

children are not able to comprehend the 
fundamental reasons for taking up the 
Christian life which we would use in trying 
to persuade adults to the service of oiu* 
Lord. They ought in all fairness to be told 
that a religious life is not merely a beautiful 
dream, which is to end in a glorious trans- 
figuration of those who pursue it, but that 
it is a resolute attaching of one's life to Jesus 
Christ, with the intention of serving him 
and those for whom he died" (Northwestern 
Christian Advocate Editorial). 

I repeat that it is the parent's chief busi- 
ness to have the child very decidedly 
prejudiced in favor of the good as against 
the evil by the time he is able to choose for 
himself. The influences of evil surrounding 
the child are very active and will most surely 
have bent the child in that direction if we 
have not filled the child life with good things. 
It is simply the voice of ignorance and mis- 
information that declares otherwise. His- 
tory is replete with the names of men and 
women whose characters have been wonder- 
fully molded in childhood. Nations have 
trained their children to certain ideals and 
thus have molded their citizenship after 

98 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

their national ideals. The Hebrew people 
thoroughly trained their children in the wor- 
ship of Jehovah, and in that training we find 
the secret of their peculiar development. 
They were a nation apart from their bar- 
barous surroundings, and because of their 
religious tenets came to be a superior 
nation. Israel could never have been a 
nation of peculiar people whose God was 
Jehovah had they followed the altogether 
too prevalent modern notion that it is wrong 
and narrow to indoctrinate the child for fear 
of prejudicing him. The Roman Catholics 
and the Lutherans put others to shame in 
this particular, and at the same time show 
us what is possible for Protestantism to do 
in the same general direction. To suppose 
that God did not intend us to use those very 
impressionable years for good is not only 
irrational, but now, in the light of modern 
thought, is positively irreligious. "Indeed, 
I have learned that environment is com- 
monly (not always) decisive in shaping 
character, that the body profoundly influ- 
ences the soul, and that the individual is in 
a very large measure what society has made 
him" (Josiah Strong). The Christlike 

99 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

method is to begin with the child as soon as 
the Divine commits it into our hands, and 
from the very first day give it a rehgious 
atmosphere, as essential to the proper de- 
velopment of the child nature as sunshine is 
to the rose. Let the child's dawning con- 
sciousness behold the parents returning 
thanks to God for food and material things. 
Let him see the parents devoutly kneeling 
around the family altar in proper recogni- 
tion of our dependence upon the Creator. 
Let him feel from the very earliest moment 
of his life the atmosphere which prompts to 
such a spirit of worship. Let him be taught 
to pray just as soon as he can lisp a few 
words. Better teach him a prayer or a sen- 
sible story than a meaningless Mother Goose 
rime. The mental discipline will be just 
as good and the moral effect will be much 
better. Give him a part in the family wor- 
ship as soon as he can repeat a little prayer. 
Let him associate the idea of his prayer with 
the act of worship on the part of the parents. 
Let him discover that the parents are very 
much interested in the church, and are 
regular attendants, and are not to be kept 
away from divine worship for every trifling 

100 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

excuse. Let his keen intuition discover that 
the rehgion of his parents is genuine. Take 
him to church and teach him that he is a 
member of the church. Have him baptized 
and let him know that he is a Christian and 
is expected to act as Christian people act. 
Never let him ask, "Am I a member of the 
church?" and be compelled to tell him "No." 
He will ask you why, and you cannot answer 
him. He will want to belong to the church 
if father and mother do. Do not ever allow 
him to feel that somehow he is under con- 
demnation for a mysterious sin which a mys- 
terious Adam committed uncertain eons 
ago, and which has in some unexplainable 
way descended upon him. I can almost hear 
verbal protest to this. I have heard them 
when preaching this phase of the subject. 
Some will say it is unscriptural. Others 
will say it is all of no use. It is purely 
mechanical and the child does not under- 
stand. Of course he understands only 
up to his capacity and as his parents 
and teachers help him. He will understand 
a great deal more than we usually think. 
But what are parents for if not to help their 
children in these things ? It was very biblical 

101 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

for the Jews to circumcise their male chil- 
dren on the eighth day and to consecrate 
them to temple service and coimt them estab- 
lished in the religion of their fathers at 
twelve years of age. Christ put his approval 
upon this principle of consecrating child- 
hood, and the whole spirit of biblical teach- 
ing is in that direction, and history abim- 
dantly confirms the wisdom of it. The his- 
tory of Susannah Wesley's family is known 
round the earth. Was she not thoroughly 
Christian and perfectly sane in the care of 
her many children? It is simply a question 
of determining the environment of the child, 
particularly as pertains to religious influ- 
ences. It is bringing good influences to bear 
and shutting out bad ones. It is causing 
his dawning moral consciousness to know 
that he is a moral being and that both God 
and his parents expect him to be good and 
do the right. It is bending the resultant line 
by augmenting the power of environment. 
In childhood is the best time to influence 
the direction of life; and if we neglect it 
through carelessness or through fear of 
prejudicing the child, we will find to our 
sorrow that evil has not hesitated to use 

102 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

those moments and has turned the child hfe 
very decidedly in the direction of evil. 

To condense this argument: Religion is 
an instinct born in the child, planted by the 
hand of God. Given the proper stimuli, it 
will respond very readily. The child is full 
of instincts. Professor James has named 
twenty-four. Place the child to its mother's 
breast and it will draw its nourishment 
without being able to explain a single law of 
physiology or of physics which he uses. If 
he is feeling very good and the mother plays 
with him a little, he will smile, and he is not 
yet able to tell just why it is that he laughs, 
and possibly if he should live to be very aged 
he could not explain the peculiar and almost 
irresistible response to that peculiar stimula- 
tion. Who of us understands the psychol- 
ogy of a mother's smile ? We smile in return, 
and the only known reason is the child's 
reason — " 'Cause." The child's instinct of 
motion, of grasping attractive objects, of 
fear, of love all awake when properly stimu- 
lated. Rehgion is an instinct with the child 
and akin to these. It will respond to stimu- 
lation, and the way to stimulate it is to put 
the child into contact with religion. Have 

103 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

him perform his part, be it ever so mechan- 
ical, and one day he will respond naturally 
and do quite intelligently that which he has 
been doing mechanically. The impressions 
of childhood will serve him well. He will 
have formed "brain grooves," in which his 
conscious self will act as a matter of habit. 
The resultant line of his life will have been 
bent in the right direction. He will not have 
been left to the blind powers of heredity and 
to uninformed choice. It is better thus to 
conform environment than to submit to 
blind chance. The very unfortunate way 
into which we have fallen calls for protest. 
Only a very few homes have any religious 
exercises. Children grow to maturity with- 
out ever having seen their professedly 
Christian parents pray. 

A theological student was spending his 
summer out in New York State supplying 
a charge. He was going around calling upon 
the people, and being of a serious turn, he 
believed in the old-fashioned way of having 
worship with the people. At one place he 
asked the privilege of praying with the 
family before leaving and the privilege was 
accorded. The amazed children, however, 

104 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

were unused to any such performance, and 
one lad, perhaps ten years of age, after hold- 
ing in as long as he could, called out, half in 
fear, "Ma, what's he do'n?" Needless to 
say, it brought the prayer to a sudden ter- 
mination. It would be well at least to have 
our children so well taught and trained that 
they will understand what one is doing when 
offering prayer. A more or less regular 
attendance at Sunday school is all the reli- 
gion the average modern child sees till, per- 
haps, at the age of sixteen or eighteen he 
begins to attend church for social reasons. 
The parents do not keep the child in the 
church service because, perchance, it would 
injure his nervous system, notwithstanding 
there is little evidence of children ever hav- 
ing been injured in this way. Our fore- 
fathers were reared in the church under 
sermons three or four hours long, and, as a 
rule, they were rather a sturdy lot both 
physically and morally. The real reason is 
that as parents and preachers we are not 
willing to stand the bother. Or perhaps I 
should put it a little more mildly and say 
that we do not understand the importance of 
this sort of training. Doubtless we would 

105 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

be willing to pay the price if we realized its 
real value. O for the days of the family 
pew, when father, mother, grandmother, and 
all the children were habitually seated to- 
gether in the church service and worshiped 
as a family regularly! Such a custom is 
what we need to-day along with a genuine 
home religion, all of which would be calcu- 
lated to bring the religious instinct within 
the range of proper stimulation and deter- 
mine as far as may be the power of environ- 
ment, and therefore have the proper bearing 
on life's resultant. 



106 



CHAPTER IV 

INSTINCTIVE, INTELLIGENT, 
AND ADOLESCENT PERIODS 



She called his name Samuel, saying. Because 
I have asked him of Jehovah. . . . For this child 
I prayed; and Jehovah hath given me my petition 
which I asked of him: therefore also I have granted 
him to Jehovah; as long as he liveth he is granted 
to Jehovah. . . . And the child did minister unto 
Jehovah before Eli the priest. . . . Samuel min- 
istered before Jehovah, being a child, girded with 
a linen ephod. . . . And the child Samuel ministered 
unto Jehovah before Eli. And the word of Jehovah 
was precious in those days; there was no frequent 
vision. And it came to pass at that time, when 
Eli was laid down in his place (now his eyes had 
begun to wax dim, so that he could not see), and 
the lamp of God was not yet gone out, and Samuel 
was laid down to sleep, in the temple of Jehovah, 
where the ark of God was: that Jehovah called 
Samuel: and he said. Here am I. And he ran 
unto Eli and said. Here am I; for thou calledst 
me. And he said, I called not; lie down again. 
. . . And Jehovah called Samuel again the third 
time. And he arose and went to Eli, and said. 
Here am I; for thou calledst me. And Eli per- 
ceived that Jehovah had called the child. There- 
fore Eli said unto Samuel, Go, lie down: and it 
shall be, if he call thee, that thou shalt say. Speak, 
Jehovah; for thy servant heareth. So Samuel 
went and lay down in his place. And Jehovah 
came and stood, and called as at other times, 
Samuel, Samuel. Then Samuel said. Speak; for 
thy servant heareth. — 1 Sam. parts of Chapters 
1, 2y and 3. 

To thee. Almighty God, to thee. 

Our childhood we resign: 
'Twill please us to look back and see 

That our whole lives were thine. 

— Isaac Watts. 



CHAPTER IV 

INSTINCTIVE, INTELLIGENT, 
AND ADOLESCENT PERIODS 

One point on which I have sought to 
place considerable emphasis in this pro- 
tracted study is that in the early days of 
childhood the parent must stand, in some 
measure, in God's stead before the child. 
God has ordered that the parent should be 
the agent through whom his message shall 
be carried to the child. The parent is thus 
the divinely appointed means of communi- 
cation between God and the child — a very 
sacred priesthood. We will find a very good 
scriptural foundation for this thought in the 
lesson quoted on the page opposite, where 
God caused Eli to be the agent whereby he 
found contact with the young lad Samuel. 
The child Samuel had been placed under 
the care of the godly Eli, and his chief 
thought as he was growing up was to be 
obedient to his appointed guardian. The 

109 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

source of all authority for the child was in 
his godly foster parent. He knew no other 
source nor needed another. But one night 
the Lord chose to speak directly to Samuel 
instead of indirectly, as heretofore, through 
his servant Eli. At the first call of the Lord 
the child was sure that his master Eli had 
spoken, and for several times he recognized 
no difference between the call of Jehovah 
and that of his guardian, and it took wise 
direction on the part of the old prophet to 
enable the child to distinguish between the 
voice of man and the voice of God. Samuel 
got a message from Jehovah that night which 
might easily have been denied him if Eli 
had said: "O, you foolish child, go back to 
bed. You are just dreaming or imagining 
something. It is nothing. You are nervous 
and need rest. You are altogether too 
young to commune with God." In other 
words, if Eli had been possessed of the 
prevalent modern notion of childhood reli- 
gion, he would have undoubtedly defeated 
the Lord's purpose. But, fortunately for 
Samuel, the man under whom his mother 
had placed him for training was a man of 
God, and knew very well that the God who 

110 



PERIODS 

is the Creator of the child soul can speak as 
readily in a language that a child can under- 
stand as to speak to an adult. Therefore 
he would not for anything come between 
God and this child who had been so well 
trained that he was so easily competent to 
commune with God. Samuel, reared in this 
religious atmosphere, was naturally and 
easily religious. "But," you say, "all that 
was an especial case for the purpose of rais- 
ing up a great man. That was miraculous 
dealing." Nothing of the kind. God, in 
developing his great leaders, used no prin- 
ciples which would not wonderfully elevate 
the soul of any man and make him greater. 
There is not found a single principle in 
Samuel's training which is not perfectly 
natural and which may not be duplicated in 
kind by any child or parent. "He rocks 
the cradle of Samuel no more than he guides 
the steps of the good men in all ages" 
(Bishop Fowler). Samuel is simply an his- 
torical illustration of the principles which 
we are endeavoring to get firmly fixed in our 
minds. He was a child who was given the 
proper religious stimuli, and his rehgious 
nature responded to the stimuli, and his 

111 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

strong religious character was the result. 
His guardian bent the line of life early in 
the instinctive and intelligent periods so that 
the ultimate direction was quite easily de- 
termined. The poet Cowper says: 

'Tis granted, and no plainer truth appears, 
Our most important are our earliest years; 
The mind, impressable and soft, with ease 
Imbibes and copies what she hears and sees, 
And through life's labyrinth holds fast the clue 
That education gave her, false or true. 

This is true of religious education as of 
secular where it is commonly recognized. 

Let us again turn our attention to the 
chart. We will use the second feature of it 
now for our illustration. Observe the rec- 
tangle again and note the several divisions 
representing the various stages in develop- 
ment from infancy to young manhood or 
young womanhood. It is universally recog- 
nized that this period of growth falls into 
divisions more or less clearly defined. Let 
me again request that no one conclude that 
I am seeking to make any arbitrary divi- 
sions or assume that they can be made. It 
would be folly to try to fix these divisions 
arbitrarily, for every school teacher knows 

112 



PERIODS 

that while five years is fixed generally as 
the legal school age some children at five 
are more mature than others at six. It 
doubtless would be very hard to get the 
average mother to admit that her neighbor's 
child of five was brighter than her child a 
year older, but disinterested parties know 
that such is often the case, and, what is more, 
we know that it has very little significance. 
Precociousness in children is no sure sign 
of great promise at maturity. But there is 
evidently a difference in children, and this 
difference will show itself just as markedly 
in these moral fields as in the educational 
field. Moreover, social conditions have a 
great deal to do with the development of 
the child. This reverts somewhat to our 
former study of environment. The rate and 
nature of a child's religious development 
will be affected by his surroundings. The 
tendency of our modern social conditions 
where the sexes mingle freely together in 
large numbers, as in our day schools and in 
our Sunday schools, parties, etc., is toward 
a more rapid development to-day than 
formerly when people lived in sparsely 
settled communities where social and educa- 

113 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

tional advantages were limited. The modern 
village boy of sixteen who has not been com- 
pelled to work very hard and has had 
numerous companions all his days is likely 
to be more mature in many ways than the 
country boy who has had many good hard 
days' work to do, and has of necessity been 
by himself most of the time, will be at eigh- 
teen, or even twenty. The bashful country 
girl, living somewhat removed from others, 
will scarcely have thought that she is any- 
thing but a girl at sixteen, while in most 
cases the village girl of fourteen thinks she 
is a woman and able for all the social re- 
quirements of the present day. The advan- 
tage is generally with the slower develop- 
ment. One reason why we are compelled 
to go to the farm and small village com- 
munities for so much of the sturdy manhood 
and womanhood is because there the young 
people do not assume to be men and women 
quite so early, and their development is more 
normal and their judgment is likely to be 
more mature when they do come to that 
estate. Social life and conditions do un- 
doubtedly affect these periods of develop- 
ment, not only physically and mentally but 

114 



INSTINCTIVE PERIOD 

morally as well. Different children under 
the same general conditions vary so it is 
impossible to fix any arbitrary divisions. We 
use simply those which are commonly sug- 
gested, which certainly have a value for 
thought: 1. The Instinctive Period — from 
birth to five years. 2. Intelligent Period — 
from five to twelve years. 3. Adolescent 
Period — from twelve to eighteen. We will 
consider each in turn. 

1. Instinctive Period 

This is the age when the child is to be 
trained much and taught little. Here is a 
little babe, kicking and wriggling about, im- 
pelled by certain instincts of motion and of 
grasping, but none of his motions are very 
intelligent. The ordinary barnyard animal 
at his age can far outdistance him in the 
intelligent use of his body; but give him a 
little time and things will change. He 
wants to make a meal out of his thumb, but 
he is not real sure, as previously suggested, 
whether his thumb will go into his mouth or 
his eye. He sees a light across the room and 
reaches out for it, not knowing that the light 
is ten feet away and that his arm is scarcely 

115 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

ten inches long. He kicks because instinct 
impels him to kick, and if he can get his feet 
against something, he will push with all his 
might. He does not know why. Instinct is 
impelling him. Presently his kicking and 
pushing will manifest itself in efforts to step 
on his feet. His feet will not go where he 
wants them to go and he is not at all sure 
of his equilibrium. Imagine the father try- 
ing to teach the son how to walk and saying 
to him: "Now, son, just you watch me. This 
is the way to walk" — and across the room the 
father goes with easy strides, telling the 
baby how it is done and how very easy it is 
to do. What will the babe know about that ? 
That is teaching. He needs training. Take 
him by the hand and give him some help. 
Let his legs wabble and go in numerous 
directions if they want to. By constant 
practice he will soon begin to find himself 
and do a great deal better. Keep this up 
for a time, and one day his legs will be under 
his own control and he will not thank you 
for further assistance. He can walk alone. 
He is measurably well trained in walking. 

The child's early religious ideas are about 
as wabbly as his legs, and the wabbling has 

116 



INSTINCTIVE PERIOD 

about the same significance. It is simply the 
natural demand for training. But the in- 
stinct of religion is just as surely there as is 
the instinct of motion and will respond as 
truly under the proper stimuli. What shall 
we do with this religious instinct ? Shall we 
talk religious platitudes to it? No, that is 
fully as irrational as to walk before the child 
and expect him to discover how to step from 
watching you. Religion is not something 
external to the child to be forced into him 
as a curative for "inbred sin/' much as a 
dose of raw quinine might be given to cure 
a fever. Rehgion is wrapped up in the child 
to be nurtured and unfolded. Train him 
religiously along the hues indicated by his 
religious instincts. Do not assume that he 
simply needs to know the truths of Bible 
history in order to be a man furnished to 
every good work. He may become very 
proficient in the knowledge of the Bible as 
a man without it having any very appreci- 
able effect upon his moral nature. An at- 
torney of average reputation is very gifted 
in using Scripture quotations in pleading 
before a jury, and there is no doubt that 

Jie know3 more Bible history and fact than 

117 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

the average minister in the pulpit, and yet he 
is utterly godless. His knowledge has little 
if any bearing on his moral nature. Give 
the child something to do religiously and 
more to see during the infancy period. 
Answer his questions on religion by illus- 
tration rather than by theory. Encourage 
rather than discourage his disposition to ask 
questions on religious things. Relate all 
problems of discipline to his moral nature. 
Teach him that when he disobeys he has not 
only broken a parental mandate but has also 
grieved a loving God. Remember that he 
is watching your every motion and will 
develop your habits. Remember that it is 
quite likely that he has inherited tendencies 
that make it easy for him to do what you do, 
and, remembering this, encourage the good 
and discourage the evil dispositions that he 
may manifest. You must show him how to 
be reverent and worshipful. He must be 
led to transfer the seat of moral authority 
from his parents to God very early in life. 
Follow the thought of the kindergarten and 
get the right thought to spring from the 
right act. The parent must do absolutely 
nothing that he does not wish his child to 

118 



INSTINCTIVE PERIOD 

do. It will avail nothing to tell him that a 
certain thing is wrong and then do that thing 
yourself, for he will surely follow the ex- 
ample and not the precept. An acquaint- 
ance of former years used to whip his boys 
for swearing, and follow with the declaration 
that if there was any swearing done around 
that place, he was going to do it himself. 
His teaching was no better than his training, 
and as a result his boys all learned to swear. 
The sum of it all is that we must constantly 
study to conform the child life. We cannot 
afford to let the child live by accident and 
trust to luck for the result. It is something 
to be carefully studied. We must not hesi- 
tate for any reason to determine his youthful 
days for good. Determine that the home 
atmosphere shall be religious not only in 
spirit but also in form; determine as far as 
possible his companionships, and if some 
neighbors' children have evil ways that you 
do not wish to develop in your child, do not 
hesitate to forbid them being together be- 
cause of a neighborly sentiment, because 
your child's moral life is of more importance 
than even neighborliness. Determine the 
church atmosphere; that is to say, take him 

119 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

to church and be very guarded about your 
talk concerning the church in his presence. 
If you have adverse criticism to offer con- 
cerning the minister or some prominent 
member of the church, do not make it in 
his hearing. Let him learn to respect highly 
the church. Be as Eli was to Samuel, the 
means of communicating God's will to the 
child, imtil such time as God can commune 
with the child direct. 

2. Intelligent Period 

Passing to the intelligent period, we have 
different moral conditions. By the intel- 
ligent period is meant that age in which the 
child comes to reason about things, the age 
in which his reasoning powers are beginning 
to unfold and he begins to be able to take 
hold of moral problems somewhat indepen- 
dent of the thought of others. Somewhere 
about five years of age the normal child will 
begin to recognize right and wrong as a 
matter of principle. His moral conscious- 
ness will begin to unfold. If during the 
infancy period he has been carefully trained, 
he will have some quite clear ideas of right 
and wrong. 

120 



INTELLIGENT PERIOD 

To illustrate this thought allow me to use 
an experience which I remember quite clearly 
from my boyhood days. The incident hap- 
pened to be quite definite and made a clear 
impression on my mind, and perhaps for 
that reason I remember it rather more dis- 
tinctly than is ordinary in such cases. I was 
a small lad of barely five years. Like any 
other child, the only thing that had directed 
me thus far was parental authority. Father 
and mother had told me to do certain things 
and not to do others, and they were the sole 
source of authority. A thing was right or 
wrong according as it was permitted or for- 
bidden by my parents. Of course they 
tried to make me understand that their com- 
mands and advice were based on principles 
of right and wrong, but so far as I remember 
this element in their teaching was not con- 
sciously recognized by me. It undoubtedly 
made its impression upon my subconscious 
self, but as a child I did not recognize that 
fact. Accordingly, one day when I was 
playing at a neighbor's I discovered a car- 
penter's rule that attracted my attention and 
I was seized with a sudden desire to possess 
that rule, and, yielding to the impulse, I put 

121 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

it into my pocket and at the first oppor- 
tunity I made way for home. I only got 
part way home, however, when I began to 
feel very micomfortable about the rule. I 
remember very distinctly what a new sensa- 
tion I had. I am sure that my consbience 
awoke to its own authority at that time. The 
rule fairly burned in my pocket and I was 
tempted to throw it away. Somehow it came 
to me very plainly that I was doing wrong, 
and I sat down upon the little bridge in the 
valley and thought the whole thing through 
and came to the conclusion that I had done 
a great wrong. There was no person near 
to tell me that I ought not to take something 
that did not belong to me. I suppose, be- 
yond doubt, I had been told that many times, 
as all children must be, but now I did not 
need to be told. With this thought there 
burst upon me with terrible force the wrong- 
ness of stealing, and I got up and, hurry- 
ing back, put the rule where I had found it. 
I had done a great wrong and knew it for 
myself, and had for the first time some ap- 
preciation of what real wrongness or sin is. 
My moral consciousness was waking and I 
was passing from instinctive action to in- 

122 



INTELLIGENT PERIOD 

telligent action. Who shall say that I did 
not experience a great moral victory that 
day ? As I recall it now it seems to me to be 
one of the greatest of my life, though from 
adult standpoints there was so little in- 
volved. Some experience in the life of each 
one of us marks a similar change and indi- 
cates the rise of our moral sense. Not every 
one will happen to get such a definite im- 
pression of their first moral choice as I did, 
and thus only a few will have it so vividly 
fixed in mind. But the fact is the same in 
all persons, though the very sudden transi- 
tion may not occur. 

I was listening to a conversation carried 
on by a group of very intelligent ladies 
recently. They were old neighbors and 
dropped into reminiscent moods. Each one 
of the group had had some experience in 
childhood that corresponded with mine. 
Two of them had been implicated together 
in stealing some cookies from a neighbor 
and had gone through this same experience 
of discovering themselves to be thieves. If 
we will recall, there will likely be some ex- 
perience in the lives of us all when our moral 
selves began to be assertive. With this 

123 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

beginning, therefore, and some years after, 
until the moral sense is quite developed, we 
term the intelligent period, from five to 
twelve years approximately. This is a divi- 
sion commonly recognized and has been 
recognized from early ages and has a fairly 
accurate basis. What, then, is the moral 
significance of this period and what are the 
religious opportunities? This is really the 
important part of the discussion, though our 
answer to that question will be determined 
largely by our thought of what has gone 
before. What are we to do for the child in 
this age? 

From what has been already said you nave 
concluded that my thought is that, as a rule, 
the child may be naturally directed to God 
and not allowed to wander away from him. 
My contention is that, given a reasonably 
good heredity, with an infancy period of 
rational training, the child during the intel- 
ligent period will be turned easily to a con- 
scious relation to God and a knowledge for 
himself that he is a child of God. With his 
discovery that there is a seat of power some- 
where superior to father and mother who is 
really the determiner of right and wrong, 

J24 



INTELLIGENT PERIOD 

there should be Httle difficulty in teaching 
him that God is that power and in inducing 
him to transfer his affections there. If, like 
Eli, we at the proper time succeed in turn- 
ing the eyes of our children from ourselves 
to God as the supreme authority, we shall 
have done well indeed. If we enable God to 
get an interview with the child, it will surely 
be to the advantage of the child. This must 
be our chief concern in those days when the 
moral sense of the child is developing and 
when he is beginning to find out the differ- 
ence between right and wrong, or else he will 
get away from our control and refuse to 
recognize any authority above his own im- 
pulse and become a sort of moral anarchist. 
Some parents never succeed in convincing 
the child that they have authority. The 
child considers the father as one who is the 
larger, and therefore the one who can pun- 
ish, and hence the child does not conceive 
that there is authority anywhere apart from 
compulsion. Many children are governed 
through fear and have regard for their 
parents only because they are forced to 
through dread of punishment. The father 
is the stronger, and therefore the son has to 

125 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

do what he is told; but one day the son dis- 
covers that he is a person and about as strong 
as his father, and he rebels against that sort 
of government and very naturally against 
all authority, unless by some circumstance 
he is induced to look upon the authority of 
God in a different light. 

This period also brings in new possibili- 
ties. Now the child may be taught as well 
as trained. This is the memory age and the 
tiipe for abundant seed-sowing. Barring 
reasonable physical limitations, the child 
should be kept in the Sunday school and also 
the church. He should be encouraged to 
read religious literature, and certainly a 
reasonable amount of church and Bible his- 
tory. Bible history is presented in forms as 
fascinating as any fiction, and usually more 
wholesome. Generally, with a little help 
from the parents the child mind may be 
stored with facts concerning the Bible, and 
especially Bible characters, as this is the 
hero age for the child and the Bible is full of 
heroic characters. Margaret E. Sangster's 
Bible stories and others of this character 
will be preferred usually to the ordinary 
storybook if the parent work with the child 

126 



INTELLIGENT PERIOD 

a little and help his tastes to form along 
right lines. The child will not need much 
logic or much theology just now. He will 
want narrative in such forms as to convey 
the fundamental truths to his mind. Induce 
him if possible, and if this cannot be done, 
insist that he commit to memory the best 
portions of the Bible. The notion that such 
a course will give him a repugnance to the 
Bible is wrong. It is proven over and over 
again that a child needs to be held to many a 
task that after a while becomes agreeable to 
him. No normal boy will work very long at 
any task unless there is authority back of 
him. We do not hesitate to hold a lad to 
taking music lessons for many days, not 
fearing at all that when he is a man he will 
as a consequence have a dislike for music. 
This must be done as a part of life's dis- 
cipline of work, and so also in the religious 
realm. It is a good thing for the child to 
use the memory age for committing what 
will be of invaluable service to him in after 
years. Therefore he may well be held to the 
task. We are making a great mistake now- 
adays by allowing the child to crowd out all 
things religious during this memory period 

127 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

because the day school requires all his time. 
What right has secular education to demand 
all of a child's time? Religious instruction 
is the most important thing of all just now, 
and rather than neglect it lighten the school 
work if necessary to the extent of losing 
some time. As a matter of fact, this work 
can be accomplished in catch moments with- 
out requiring much time. A reasonable 
presentation to the child mind of the Bible 
by those who earnestly believe in the Bible 
will not only be possible but will also be 
welcomed by the average child. The great 
difficulty lies often in the way it is presented. 
Our Sunday schools are lamentably weak, 
as a rule, in presenting truth. A large class 
of young ladies who are very faithful in at- 
tendance upon the Sunday school service, 
and all of whom have been in the Sunday 
school from childhood, were asked recently 
what the name "Nazareth" suggested to 
them, and not one knew what it meant. 
These girls are from fourteen to eighteen 
years of age and constitute what is consid- 
ered one of the best classes in the Sunday 
school. This is just a hint of the inadequate 
teaching our children are getting gener- 

128 



INTELLIGENT PERIOD 

ally. It is no reflection on the Sunday 
school, but indicates that we must not trust 
entirely to that agency for religious instruc- 
tion of the young. 

We will need to remember that in this 
period the child is still controlled consider- 
ably by instinct. The transition is not 
sudden. Religious enthusiasm is easily 
kindled by enthusiastic religious leaders. 
Remember that the child who so easily 
grasps things in memory now will soon 
change, and unless his mind is stored in this 
memory age he will have to work very hard 
to acquire the desired knowledge later. Our 
familiarity with the word of Scripture de- 
pends quite largely upon our handling of it 
in childhood. Of course we may overcome 
this handicap to some extent, but we will all 
witness that the things which we learned in 
childhood are the things which abide. If 
memory is trained at the proper time, it be- 
comes stronger for use in after years. It 
is quite difficult for a mature man to do much 
memory work unless his mind was trained to 
it from childhood. There are stages in life 
when some things are natural, and when 
those stages are closed that opportunity has 

129 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

largely passed. We must also remember to 
trust the child's developing self. When he 
begins to show that he has a moral sense of 
his own we must allow him to use it. Put 
him on his honor and let him know that he 
is trusted and expected to do the right thing. 
We can no more expect his moral nature to 
develop if the parent does all the choosing 
than we can expect his muscles to grow 
properly without exercise. He will surely 
make some blunders, but so do grown up 
people, and his blundering will come out all 
right in the end. 

Perhaps this matter is not so interesting 
as some of the phases which we have been 
discussing, but it is of vast importance. The 
course suggested means hard work for the 
parents. But we must learn that we cannot 
rear our children well by following the line 
of least resistance. We must give thought 
and time to the matter, and unless we are 
willing to do this we are not worthy to be- 
come parents. We must not allow this 
period between the ages of five and twelve 
to go by without having stored the child's 
mind well with Bible knowledge. The 
catechetical age is the time for seed-sowing, 

130 



INTELLIGENT PERIOD 

and if the springtime is allowed to pass 
without a sowing the harvest is likely to be 
small. We must also develop a moral sense 
in the child. He must presently be able to 
meet the world with some laws of righteous- 
ness well grounded in his nature. It will 
not do to keep him in ignorance of tempta- 
tion, thinking to shield him. Mothers keep 
their daughters in ignorance of sin in order 
to keep them pure, and doubtless many girls 
go astray who would never do so if their 
foolish mothers had taught them what they 
are entitled to know. The same is true of 
boys. Let us give children of both sexes 
the knowledge that they are entitled to, 
and teach them to do right on moral prin- 
ciples instead of intrusting to chance or 
instinct to guide. They cannot exercise a 
moral choice when they are ignorant of what 
is involved. 

The child from the Christian home ought 
surely to be led into a personal knowledge 
of God and brought into the church before 
he has left this period in his development. 
If the church and the home will do their 
work together as it ought to be done, there 
are very few children who may not be well 

131 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

grounded in the things of religion before this 
age passes. This does not need to be argued 
further. It is being demonstrated on every 
hand. This being done, we will be all the 
more free to give neglected childhood its due 
amount of religious teaching and training. 
How can parents neglect this all-important 
age? If parents and church would but live 
up to their opportunity in this particular, we 
could soon have a conquering church in the 
land. 

3. Adolescent Period 

The third period in the development of 
youth is known as the adolescent period. 
Adolescent is a word applied to the transi- 
tional period between childhood and matu- 
rity. It is used, therefore, to define the 
marked change that takes place in the devel- 
opment of a youth as he turns to manhood. 
One day the parent discovers that his son or 
daughter is becoming different from what 
he or she formerly was. He is growing more 
independent in act and thought and is no- 
ticeably inclined to dispute some commonly 
accepted things and to show a disposition to 
argue everything. He will even question 

132 



ADOLESCENT PERIOD 

the very fundamentals of religion with the 
utmost audacity and perhaps startle the 
parents by assuming to be a sort of agnostic. 
This will undoubtedly worry the parent, and 
he is likely to grow very impatient with the 
child; but now of all times is when he must 
be patient. His child is passing through a 
transformation, physical, mental, and moral. 
This is no time for arbitrary commanding. 
The son is very proud of his new-found 
mentahty and will greatly appreciate a 
deference being paid to it, and will sternly 
resent any depreciation of it. The indi- 
viduality of the child has suddenly come to 
be so strong that he will not submit to 
methods of discipline at one time perfectly 
proper. Now is the time when the parent 
must depend chiefly upon what he has done 
in childhood to tide him over this uncertain 
age. He must appeal to the sense of honor 
and rightness already established in the 
child. If proper care has been given to the 
child during the infancy period and during 
the dawning of intelligent choice, this com- 
ing young man will most likely pass through 
this period of rough sailing all right. If 
there has been little done in these formative 

133 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

periods, the outcome will be wholly uncer- 
tain. This is the period also when the 
church must exercise great care in its work. 
The church must induce the child to con- 
firm for himself all the good which has been 
selected for him in the years of parental 
oversight. The church will need to be at- 
tractive to the youth in this period and 
elderly people will need to have some good 
judgment. The pastor will need to plan 
for and with his young people and cause the 
church to mean the most possible for the 
young. It will not do to construct the church 
simply to the needs of the elders and de- 
mand that the young shall conform their 
tastes to the standards set by the church. 
This does not imply a lowering of moral 
standards in the least. It simply implies 
the need for adaptability on the part of the 
church. No greater field awaits and no de- 
mand is more imperative than that the 
church be attractive and offer something that 
will appeal strongly to the young people. 
If a wise church and a wise pastor work 
together on children that have been prop- 
erly trained in the earlier periods, there will 
be little loss. For this reason I have been 

134 



ADOLESCENT PERIOD 

placing so much emphasis on early train- 
ing, even in the verj^ earliest days of child- 
hood. Those periods of careful training will 
have so conformed the child's nature that 
if he does not choose the good during his 
adolescent period, he will have to go against 
every element in his nature. It is not at all 
likely that he will revoke all the principles 
that have been fixed as habits in his early 
days. If he is not, with his new-found self, 
consciously religious, this is the time for the 
church to induce him to choose positively to 
serve God. It is nothing to be alarmed over 
if at this period he should show a disposition 
to waver in the religious habits of his child- 
hood days. This is the golden harvest age. 
It is the age of the fixing of choices, and 
religion must be given a fair presentation, 
one suited to his changed personality, in the 
strong hope that the youth, with his new- 
found mentality, will confirm his earlier de- 
cisions and continue to be religious. It is 
not strange nor a matter of great concern 
that he should have some mental uncertain- 
ties. Keep his conduct right, if possible — 
and it is usually possible if the earlier train- 
ing has been right — and the vagaries of 

135 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

adolescent thinking will soon pass away. 
The parent must at this time use all his 
persuasive power or he will lose the advan- 
tage of all the years of effort. So often the 
parent will not appeal personally to the 
child on religious subjects. This is an unpar- 
donable mistake. All the influences of love 
must be brought to bear upon him, for evil 
is seeking to win him in a way perhaps never 
equaled in life again. He must be appealed 
to as a person, independent and capable of 
making moral choices for himself. Let him 
feel that you have placed the responsibility 
with him and are trusting him to choose 
right. Counsel but do not attempt to force. 
If only the parent has succeeded in keeping 
the confidence of the child, and can in these 
years use his experience to help the child's 
inexperience, he will surely be the agent in 
God's hands of properly directing the child. 
Like Eli, he will bring him to God for fur- 
ther instruction when he discovers that God 
is speaking to the youth. 

The adolescent is in danger of getting one 
of two erroneous ideas concerning religion. 
Either he will conclude that religion is a 
very sober affair, and thus become morbid 

136 



ADOLESCENT PERIOD 

and self-conscious, or, on the other hand, he 
will conclude that religion is a very trifling 
affair and not to be taken seriously at all, 
just a pohte convenience and good form in 
general, and from this come to conclude that 
moral distinctions are of little moment after 
all. He may either seek to assume a 
"grandmother experience," and be so very 
old in his religious conceptions that he is 
unnatural, or else fail to take the matter 
seriously enough, and yet all the while con- 
sider himself a Christian. Both these con- 
ditions must be guarded against. Religion 
is a perfectly normal state for a young per- 
son as well as for an old man or woman. A 
young person should certainly not have a 
morbid religion nor, on the other hand, a 
religion without moral distinctions. It ought 
to be and may be a religion that meets his 
needs as a young man and at the same time 
prove a very decided help toward right liv- 
ing. This the parent and the church can 
provide if the proper work has been done by 
way of preparation. If there has been no 
preparation, no foundation work done, the 
task is much harder and the outcome de- 
cidedly more uncertain. Manifestly, if 

137 



/parent, child, and church 

there has been neglect of opportunity in the 
early days, there will need to be desperate 
measures used to catch up, and then at best 
there is lost ground that can never be fully 
regained. There is no better Christian than 
one trained to the work of Christ from child- 
hood. Every church has many workers who 
have been servants of God from early child- 
hood, and they are a type to be depended 
upon. Every thoughtful man will look 
upon the time spent in sinfulness as lost, 
morally speaking. He may go on to a very 
good life, but he looks upon the years of 
boyhood spent in recklessness as a great 
waste. Why, then, this paralyzing indiffer- 
ence on the part of parents? Why this al- 
most criminal indifference on the part of the 
church? We see our defects. Why not 
apply ourselves to the remedy? 

I must close this part of the discussion. 
I hope I have not failed in making plain 
what I set out to discuss. I started out to 
argue for early religious training. I have 
found that it all reverts to that idea. We 
must begin at the beginning, and if we do 
not there is at best a gap left. Successful 
work in the period from five to twelve de- 

138 



ADOLESCENT PERIOD 

pends in a measure on what has gone before 
in the infancy days. Most surely does the 
outcome of the adolescent period depend on 
what has gone before. It has seemed to me 
that the many writers on rehgious work in 
the adolescent period have largely over- 
looked this fact. The storminess of adoles- 
cence is measurably averted if proper care 
has been taken before. We must begin at 
the very beginning and carefully bend the 
resultant line. 

The life of every true parent is wrapped 
up in the child. His welfare is the parent's 
welfare, and anything we may do for him to 
make him better is not only a privilege but 
a God-given duty. To neglect the early 
religious life of the child is almost an un- 
pardonable sin. The Master himself said 
that it were better for us that a millstone 
be hanged about our necks and that we be 
drowned in the sea than that we should 
offend one of his little ones. What Eli did 
for Samuel we in most cases can do for our 
children. Let us resolve that henceforth we 
will give earnest and prayerful thought to 
this parental duty and see if we cannot as- 
sure more of our children for the Kingdom. 

139 



CHAPTER V 

THE THEOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD 
RELIGION 



CHAPTER V 

THE THEOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD 
RELIGION 

It is not within the proper scope of these 
discussions to undertake a technical treatise 
on the theology of childhood religion, and 
perhaps the subject heading is somewhat 
misleading. It is necessary, however, in view 
of some suggestions made previously, to 
consider some points more fully than was 
possible in the midst of discussions which 
did not easily permit of digressions into dis- 
tinctively theological fields. It is not at all 
within the mind of the writer to seem to have 
undertaken the task of giving a comprehen- 
sive study in theology on the subject under 
discussion. Such a study would be well 
worth while if some mature scholar should 
see fit to undertake it. In some research 
work along the lines of these pages we find 
that there has been much written on the 
points involved, but always so intermingled 

143 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

with other matter as to be somewhat eon- 
fusing. We have wished, in view of the 
modern emphasis on child-training, that 
some scholarly volmne were available which 
would confine itself entirely to childhood 
religion. In these pages, however, from the 
beginning the aim has been to keep within 
the range of conversational language, and 
to bring some thoughts which are usually 
treated in the language of the scholar before 
the minds of those most vitally interested 
in childhood development in such a way as 
to help them in their very responsible task. 
The average parent and church worker, how- 
ever well educated, unless he happened to 
be versed in the technical language of 
theology, would get very little help out of 
the writings in which this subject is most 
generally treated. We are having much 
discussion of child-training in all our church 
conventions, conferences, and elsewhere, and 
this is a hopeful sign. It is something to be 
awake to the problem. One phase of the 
question, needs particular emphasis and 
would seem to be the necessary starting 
point. We would change the customary 
form of the question somewhat and state it 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

something like this: What can be done to 
train the parents with reference to the reh- 
gious welfare of their children? 

It will have been noted by the careful 
reader that so far nothing has been said 
about the possible work of the Holy Spirit 
during the infancy and intelligent periods 
of childhood development. The failure to 
introduce this unmeasured power into the 
discussion for the time was intentional. For 
the sake of clearness and that we might 
keep our minds fixed on the main points 
under consideration, and because there is no 
contradiction in leaving the specific mention 
of the Spirit out of a discussion of this char- 
acter, we proceeded with the two influences 
heredity and environment and trusted to a 
supplementary statement to introduce the 
fact of the Spirit's power. In fact the 
Spirit's influence is not altogether omitted 
from the argument. We have insisted that 
certain religious instincts invest the child 
soul and respond to proper stimuli, and we 
may class the work of the Spirit as chief 
among these stimuli. We very properly say 
without contradicting our principles that the 
work of the Spirit is the greatest incentive 

145 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

in the unfoldment of the child hfe. The 
Great Father creates the soul with reference 
to the natural surroundings in which it must 
be placed, and the Spirit undoubtedly co- 
operates with what we choose to call natural 
conditions or environment. It would not be 
far wrong if we should broaden our concep- 
tion of environment so as to include the Holy 
Spirit. Certain it is that this beneficent 
power can do his work for the soul more 
easily if we choose an environment for the 
child in harmony with the Father's will. We 
speak of an atmosphere in which the Holy 
Spirit may work, and the expression is not 
lacking in appropriateness. On behalf of 
the child the parent can create this atmos- 
phere. If we do what has been urged — 
place the child in contact with religious ac- 
tivities so as to stimulate his religious nature 
— we do thereby place the child where the 
Spirit has the best possible chance to affect 
the life for its unfoldment. There is scrip- 
tural evidence that God can speak to the 
child in language that the child can under- 
stand, and experience tends to confirm this 
teaching. There is close sympathy between 
the Great Father and the child life. How- 

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CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

ever, this in no way contradicts or conflicts 
with the necessity of parental care and train- 
ing. It is a commonplace in religious 
thought that God will not do a work for us 
that we may do for ourselves. So with all 
confidence in the cooperation of the Spirit 
in the matter of child-training it still remains 
that the parent has a tremendous task on 
hand, the greatness of which only a few 
recognize. 

The conviction remains that we will not 
get far in the solution of our child problem 
so long as we continue to look in the direc- 
tion so prevalent among many classes of 
church workers to this day. Much of our 
inactivity is due to a wrong theological view- 
point, and there will be no marked change in 
this field until we change our thought with 
reference to the natural moral condition of 
the child before God. Many methods of 
child-training are being devised, but what 
they imply in their application is inconsistent 
with the prevailing thought as to the moral 
state of the small child. We must presently 
revise our theology or else abandon such 
modern methods as we have thought wise to 
adopt, or else be guilty of a gross incon- 

147 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

sistency between thought and practice. The 
worker in the field has gone ahead of the 
theologian in his closet and has by his ex- 
perience made necessary a restatement of 
principle. 

I am well aware that the plainness of some 
foregoing statements will give the impres- 
sion of running directly counter to the pre- 
vailing thought as to the natural moral con- 
dition of the child. But what has been said 
is in no sense new, nor is it at all unusual, 
nor even so much of a digression from pre- 
vailing thought as might seem at first glance. 
The method of presenting it may cause it to 
appear as such. No less a person than 
Irenasus (A. D. 177) taught doctrines lead- 
ing in this same direction, though not always 
consistent with himself. Through all the 
ages of theological discussion some have 
given expression to similar thoughts, and 
certain phases of the discussion have been 
touched upon, but since such writers were 
in the minority, and supposedly greater 
themes were under consideration, child reli- 
gion has been pretty generally overlooked. 
But modern thinking is turning in another 
direction and the child is soon to come to 

148 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

his own in the reahn of theology. In a 
recent volume from the press of Charles 
Scribner's Sons, entitled Christianity and 
Sin, Dr. Robert Mackintosh reviews in a 
scholarly way the historical development of 
the doctrine of sin and shows clearly the 
trend of modern scholarship. On the phase 
of thought under discussion the trend is cer- 
tainly in the direction of Christ's great pro- 
nouncement concerning children and the 
Kingdom. We shall quote freely from his 
book as we proceed. 

Christ certainty is the supreme authority 
in so far as we are able to understand his 
teaching. All other teaching from whatever 
source must be interpreted in the light of 
his word. Unfortunately, there have crept 
into our theology during the ages of dis- 
cussion certain words and phrases that have 
assumed fixed form and are absolutely 
unyielding to the progress of thought. 
Strangely we have come to ascribe almost 
sacred meaning to these words, as if they 
were written into our Scripture under divine 
inspiration. But we need to remind our- 
selves occasionally that even antiquity is not 
a guarantee of absolute accuracy, and that 

149 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

it is not sacrilegious to question some of 
these man-made expressions. Furthermore, 
we have been so concerned with what we have 
chosen to consider the more important 
phases of theology that we have failed to 
consider the child phase as carefully as we 
should. In dealing with children too often 
our starting point has been wrong, and our 
direction biased accordingly. Inevitably we 
have failed often of arriving at our desired 
destination because of this wrong start. The 
man of theology is man the sinner, an ab- 
stract man, and having fitted our theology to 
this one model we proceed to dress up all 
humanity according to that one pattern. 
Manifestly, that is a wrong procedure, and 
this book is a sort of protest on behalf of the 
child against wearing the theological clothes 
of the elders. If this book will cause some 
pastors, parents, and Sunday school teachers 
to challenge and review their old inherited 
theology of childhood and to study the mat- 
ter over again from the beginning, it will 
have met the most ambitious aim of the 
writer. The professional theologian writes 
necessarily in the language of the scholar, 
and his readers are few. It is the business 

150 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

of the pastor to gather the theologian's hest 
thoughts and to present them to the people 
in the language of the people who are busy 
with the world's work and have no time for 
the technical language of theology. The 
average person will think with the greatest 
theologian if he will talk in conversational 
language, and often the heart of humanity 
keeps nearer the truth than abstract rea- 
soners. The aim of these pages is to bring 
to those nearest childhood some thoughts 
which are fundamental, and if possible help 
them in properly carrying on the greatest 
work before the church to-day. 

We cannot go far with a discussion of 
childhood religion until we are confronted 
with two very aged and much-discussed 
theological questions. We cannot attempt 
a full treatment of them within the limits 
of this volume, nor is it at all necessary or 
desirable, because anyone who might wish to 
study them fully can do so to better advan- 
tage in the many exhaustive works on the- 
ology. The two questions are, From whence 
comes the soul? and, From whence comes 
sin ? Happily for us to-day, there is greater 
agreement than ever before on these ques- 

151 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

tions, and the tendency of modern thought 
is plainly toward the acceptance of a solu- 
tion. This solution, or theory if it must still 
be called a theory, lends much to an under- 
standing of the question before us. In fact, 
it furnishes the necessary starting point to- 
ward any very intelligent study of a system 
of childhood religion. 

Various theories as to the origin of the 
soul have been advanced from time to time, 
but succeeding biblical and philosophical 
scholars have settled upon a minimum of 
two. It is true that we still hear occasion- 
ally from those who believe in the preexist- 
ence of the soul; that is to say, according to 
this theory, all souls that are or ever will be 
created were created at one time and by one 
act in some indefinite aeon and, as occasion 
demands, those souls are sent out to inhabit 
human bodies. This conception is held by 
only a few at best and need not seriously 
engage our attention. There remain, then, 
the two theories which receive the attention 
of the scholarship of the present, known 
respectively as traducianism and crea- 
tionism. 

According to the traducianists, the soul 

153 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

is a fractional part of the parent soul and 
emanates from the parent just as the 
physical organism has its rise with the 
parent. The soul, according to their con- 
tention, has the possibility of dividing itself 
indefinitely and thus of propagating other 
souls, while God who was concerned with 
the original has now nothing to do with the 
immediate origin of the newborn soul. All 
that the Divine has to do with the creation 
of the soul is that in the beginning he in- 
vested men with this power, but he does not 
now exercise a direct creative act in the birth 
of a soul. We need not dwell on this view 
at length. It is not our purpose to treat it 
critically. Suffice it to say that such a con- 
ception involves one in some very grave 
metaphysical difficulties from which en- 
tanglements the traducianists have not suc- 
ceeded in extricating themselves. It involves 
a strange conception of the soul to declare it 
a divisible something which, after repeated 
division, is in no wise diminished and any 
division of which has the power of dividing 
itself indefinitely. Such a conception at 
best makes the soul a material thing and 
contradicts all necessary laws of thought in 

153 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

proceeding to an endless division without 
diminishing. We can hardly bring ourselves 
to conceive of a process of multiplication 
through division. There are not many 
through-and-through traducianists who will 
be willing to take this extreme position when 
brought out in bare outline. We hear to-day 
of a modified traducianism, but the modifica- 
tion does not do away with the main diffi- 
culty. It continually reverts to material- 
ism. But the thought has so permeated our 
theology that few of the great writers have 
had the courage to completely break with it, 
and consequently much of it remains to our 
confusion. Some theologians find it easier 
to retain a smattering of this conception 
than to revise their entire system of theology, 
which they would need to do if they should 
abandon the terminology which this system 
of thought has given us. 

The other answer to the question, From 
whence comes the soul? is called creationism. 
This theory brings the Creator into direct 
relations with finite subjects in his great 
creative act. It is not to be supposed that 
from the critical standpoint this theory is 
without fault, but we are convinced that it 

154 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

is much less open to objection than the 
former. This theory holds that time is rela- 
tive to hmnan limitations and speaks of 
God's work not in the past tense but in 
a continuous present. It declares for an 
immanent God at work in the world. 
Humanly speaking, God not only has 
created but is creating souls. It does not 
go back to the garden incident, where God 
is recorded to have breathed into the nostrils 
of the material man a soul, and find the com- 
pletion of his creative act there. The soul 
of the child, according to this answer and in 
popular language, comes fresh from the 
hand of God. To test popular thought on 
this point I have asked many intelligent but 
theologically untrained people the question. 
From whence comes the soul of the child? 
Invariably, without a single exception, I 
have received essentially the answer of the 
creationist, "From the hand of God." Any 
mother who looks with love into the face of 
a newborn babe will not hesitate a moment 
to answer. In spite of all our preaching 
and teaching to the contrary, the heart of 
Christianized humanity has kept so close to 
the heart of the Great Father that it balks 

155 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

at any theory which separates God ever so 
little from the soul of the child. 

This conception, then, of an immanent 
God entering into relations with his finite 
creatures in his great creative act is accepted 
quite generally by scholarly men, and cer- 
tainly by devout people everywhere. Al- 
most universally among lay Christians it is 
held in substance that the child soul comes 
from the hand of God; it has had no pre- 
vious existence; it is individual, absolutely 
pure and immortal. The immanent Creator 
is still working in harmony with his divinely 
instituted laws and is investing the bodies, 
which are human, with souls of his own 
creating, and is, accordingly, taking man 
into cooperation with himself as from the 
beginning. The tragedy of Eden has loomed 
so large in our thought that we have uncon- 
sciously assumed that God had to change 
his plans and resort to various expedients' 
because of man's fall. God is the same 
Father toward mankind as from the begin- 
ning and has in no wise changed his divine 
activities. He continues to breathe into us 
the breath of life. If we accept this — as we 
surely must do in the face of the preponder- 

15a 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

ance of thought and of heart demands in its 
favor, as well as the scriptural teaching and 
implication with reference to the origin of 
the soul — we are brought face to face with 
some very pertinent theological questions. 
If every newborn soul is a fresh creation of 
God, how, then, is the soul tainted with 
"Adamic sin"? God surely will not send a 
soul into the world already sin-tainted. We 
revolt at the thought and declare that the 
soul from the hand of God is as pure as 
heaven itself. The parent, having nothing 
to do directly with the origin of the soul, 
cannot possibly transmit any moral bias to 
the soul. Therefore whatever bias the parent 
is responsible for is wrapped up within that 
part of the individual for which the parent 
is responsible. I am well aware of some of 
the ancient objections that will be raised to 
such a statement — for example, "dualism," 
"belittling the Infinite," etc. But that is 
where the matter rests when stripped of all 
adornments and reduced to its lowest terms. 
If God creates the soul at all, that he creates 
the soul pure goes without argument; and 
unless he has set a power operating in man 
which he cannot stop, for the origin of which 

157 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

he is responsible, it remains that whatever 
of bias may conceivably be transmitted must 
be derived from human parentage. The 
physical foundation through which the soul 
must find expression is most certainly 
affected by the human parent, as we have 
already seen under the study of heredity. 
But the soul, apart from the body, certainly 
is not affected by the earthly parent only 
indirectly through the body. If the crea- 
tionists are correct — and we cannot see how 
it can be otherwise — then we must keep 
clearly defined the human part and the divine 
part in the inhabitation of a human body 
by an immortal soul and learn to place 
the implications of such an explanation 
properly. 

We come, then, to the second question. 
From whence comes sin? It would seem to 
be necessary before we proceed with this 
discussion first to define our conception of 
sin, for we find that scholars use the word 
with different shades of meaning. For ex- 
ample. Dr. Orr, in his book Sin as a Problem 
of To-day (p. 287), uses the following 
words: "Sin is at first a principle, a tendency 
undeveloped." Manifestly, if we define sin 

158 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

thus, "a principle undeveloped," and on 
occasion being a something without guilt and 
on other occasions having guilt, we will need 
to proceed along different lines than when 
we define sin as most commonly conceived. 
On the other hand, Dr. Mackintosh, in his 
book Christianity and Sin, declares that 
"Sin is guilt against God," "an abuse of 
free will," "Sin is a wrong assertion of the 
lower self," and many similar expressions. 
This latter is more in line with the popular 
definition of sin than the former. It makes 
a vast difference, however, which definition 
we take as to the outcome of our discussion. 
We choose to consider sin as willful trans- 
gression of known law. Thus defined, from 
whence does it arise? The ancient and gen- 
erally accepted answer is that through 
Adam's fall sin entered into the world, and 
since then has been transmitted from parent 
to child, and all humanity, having sprung 
from the one first man, is, because of parent- 
age, sin-tainted. This answer has been 
glibly given without seriously asking, "How 
is it possible?" and with surprising assur- 
ance in the face of a very small scriptural 
warrant. This fact is aptly stated by Dr. 

159 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

Henry C. Sheldon, professor of systematic 
theology in Boston University School of 
Theology, and one of the most careful and 
conscientious scholars of our day. I will 
quote him at length because he shows clearly 
where we stand on the question of scriptural 
warrant for transmission of Adamic sin: 

"One familiar with the theological teach- 
ing of the centuries, with its confident and 
explicit indoctrination on original sin, or the 
Adamic connections of human sinfulness, 
is naturally surprised when he turns to the 
Bible to find it well-nigh silent on this theme. 
In the Old Testament it is not awarded a 
single direct word. Only one New Testa- 
ment writer makes specific mention of it, 
and that in the course of historical parallels 
where the line cannot be regarded as sharply 
drawn between literal fact and admissible 
symbolism. In neither Testament is there 
any approach to the assertion that the moral 
state of the race was so conditioned upon the 
conduct of Adam that if he had continued 
obedient to the divine command the race 
would have infallibly persisted in holiness. 
This is a monstrous imagination which limits 
the notion of probation to Adam alone, if it 

160 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

does not cancel it entirely, and throws the 
whole responsibility for the occurrence of 
sin upon the will of God. For if God could 
have kept every one of Adam's posterity 
from falling, then we are obliged to conclude 
that he could just as well as not have kept 
Adam from falling, and the fact of his trans- 
gression is clear proof that God was well 
pleased to have him transgress. But this 
conclusion makes a mock of sin, since it is 
perfectly manifest that what pleases God 
ought not to make anyone sorry, or else that 
it is obligatory to regard the divine pleasure 
as a subordinate interest. 

"Indirectly the Scriptures may be re- 
garded as making considerable account of 
Adam's trespass in its race connections. In 
the first place they strongly and repeatedly 
emphasize the fact of human sinfulness. 
Then again they place no little stress upon 
the continuity of human sinfulness, or its 
transmission through natural descent. In 
the light of these two representations it 
logically follows that from the scriptural 
standpoint a serious import pertains to 
Adam's trespass. It may not have been so 
destructive to Adam or to his posterity as 

161 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

theology has often pictured, but it had a 
great and somber significance as beginning 
[italics mine] the work of destruction. As 
an evil beginning, it initiated the deprava- 
tion of the race, and so may properly be put 
in antithesis, as it is by Paul, to that glorious 
beginning of regenerate life which was con- 
summated by the coming of Christ into the 
organism of himianity. 

"This is the sum of the scriptural teaching 
on the subject of original sin; that is, the 
first trespass stands out as initiating the 
moral depravation which is a general char- 
acteristic of the race. It, of course, brought 
condemnation upon the person of the trans- 
gressor; but the Scriptures nowhere ex- 
plicitly assert that this condemnation was at 
the same time that of the race, and in a fair 
construction they cannot be regarded as im- 
plying that it was. The most that can be 
alleged from the Old Testament is the list 
of instances in which the later generations 
are seemingly held accountable for the sins 
of the earlier. . . • As for the New Testa- 
ment, only two or three Pauline passages 
come into the account, as having any real 
appearance of making the race sharers in 

162 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

the guilt or condemnation of Adam's sin 
[1 Cor. 15. 22]. . . . Men did not actually 
sin in his [Adam's] sin, or become sinners 
through him without an exercise in detail 
of personal agency, any more than they were 
actually crucified with Christ. Why should 
a prosaic and rigorous construction be de- 
manded in the one instance and excluded 
in the other?" 

This extended quotation from System of 
Christian Doctrine, edition of 1900, pages 
311-314, may be taken to represent fairly 
the best conservative thought of the day on 
this much-debated subject and surely dis- 
pels somewhat our familiar and very con- 
fident answer as to the origin of sin. It 
does not follow that the biblical story of the 
fall of Adam has no significance for theol- 
ogy, but, rather, that we have been reading 
too much into it. "The heart of the meaning 
[Adam Story] is that sin began and begins 
when men do that which they know they 
ought not to do" (Bishop McConnell). 
What we are interested in just now is to 
emphasize the conviction that the transmis- 
sion of a sin-tainted soul is an impossibility. 
"A guilty infant is a contradiction in 

163 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

terms." "We do not believe that any indi- 
vidual act of sin is forced by circumstances 
or by heredity upon a reluctant will." "Sin 
before the presence of will is not sin at all." 
"Worldliness is a tone of mind" (Dr. Mack- 
intosh). These quotations forcefully ex- 
press the thought of many scholars and indi- 
cate a change in the direction of thought on 
the part of devout Bible students. We 
conclude, therefore, that we must look for 
the fact of sin in that realm over which man 
is allowed control. We do most certainly 
inherit much from the past, but that inherit- 
ance must be traced in the flesh rather than 
in the spirit. All of heredity is wrapped up 
within the physical organism, for which the 
parent is responsible, and inheres not at all 
in the soul, for which God is responsible. If 
we care to retain a consecutive line of in- 
heritance, there can be no objection, pro- 
vided we remember always that there have 
intervened between us and Adam a good 
many generations. This fact of a physical 
foundation that is more or less affected by 
sinful parents, inhabited with a soul as pure 
as God can create it, brings into proper 
proportions the tremendous importance of 

164 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

child-training, and the demand for a train- 
ing which shall begin at the earliest possible 
moment. There can be no question that 
the physical organism of the child is in- 
vested with certain human tendencies. We 
may call them Adamic if we wish, but as 
parents we must never forget what a part we 
have played in reproducing them. It hardly 
becomes us to try to afflict Adam with re- 
sponsibilities which are plainly our own. 

Looking in this direction, then, we come 
to the really vital question, which is: Given 
a child whose soul is as pure as heaven, but 
whose body, through which that soul must 
express itself, is invested with certain human 
tendencies good and bad, how shall we deal 
with the child to best conserve the good and 
eliminate the evil, so that when he comes to 
the age of intelligent and responsible action 
he will choose to go in the right direction? 
The answer is very complex, and no one is 
fully competent to make it, but the modern 
study of the problem is advancing toward a 
solution. The foregoing suggestions have 
been added to what has already been said 
and written to help a little in working out 
the problem. It is the parent's problem and 

165 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

the church's problem, and thus far as a 
church we have not seriously undertaken its 
solution. Surely, our homes generally are 
not applying themselves to the task as 
earnestly as the occasion demands. If, how- 
ever, the child is a sinner born and bred, 
there is little to do but to keep him in proper 
bounds by home discipline and await the 
time when he can intelligently grapple with 
the problem of personal redemption. This 
is what we are doing generally, and we can- 
not escape the conviction that the main 
reason for our doing this is the ancient 
theological notion that has possessed us. If, 
on the other hand, the child is born a child 
of God, then our big business is to keep him 
such. All rational methods of training are 
consistent with this thought and further de- 
velopments are to be expected. 

The Catholic Church has been consistent 
throughout the years because of her teach- 
ing that ecclesiastical intervention meets the 
need for the child. Protestantism long ago 
abandoned that idea but failed to bridge the 
inevitable gap left. We have resorted to 
some very strange expedients to avoid the 
ancient but only consistent idea that if a 

166 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

child is born a sinner and dies before con- 
scious regeneration takes place, he is lost. 
The church of John and Cotton Mather, 
and, indeed, much later, conceived with the 
Cathohcs that baptismal regeneration met 
the need. This notion was banished from 
Protestantism, more by popular thought 
than by the reasonings and research of the 
scholar, but some substitute must be found 
to round out a system of theology. To meet 
this need it was concluded that the child was 
redeemed through the unconditioned atone- 
ment. It is evident, however, that since the 
child has no option in this matter, its appli- 
cation is about as mechanical as baptismal 
regeneration, or ecclesiastical intervention 
of any sort, against which we have protested 
so vigorously. It is an atonement for sin 
for which the helpless child is held respon- 
sible, though he has not intelligently com- 
mitted a sin, and the atonement takes place 
without the consciousness of the child in a 
way equally as mysterious as the imputation 
of the unintelligent guilt. When put thus 
in its simplest form we must see how contra- 
dictory such an idea is. We have persist- 
ently ignored the plain teaching of Christ 

167 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

when he spoke with reference to the child 
and said, "To such belongeth the kingdom." 
Christ has given us not the least hint that 
the child who has not intelligently com- 
mitted a wrong act is a sinner. Rather he 
strongly indorsed the child relation to him- 
self and declared it to be the ideal to which 
all must subscribe in order to be saved. As 
we have already said, we begin our theology 
with abstract man the sinner and try to fit 
all humanity into that one mold. We must 
learn to start where Christ did — ^with the 
child — and conform ourselves to that ideal. 
Our chief concern must be to keep the child 
in the relation approved by him. 

What shall we say of "inbred sin"? It is 
at best a misnomer. The expression is alto- 
gether too large to convey the meaning evi- 
dently intended and will not admit of the 
restrictions commonly forced upon it. The 
expression is too well put to convey any 
other meaning than that which appears on 
the surface. Used literally, it contradicts 
our contention that sin is a fact of the soul 
accomplished by willful disobedience to 
known principles of right. We can in no 
way harmonize the two. If the soul is 

168 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

traduced from the parent, we may properly 
speak of "inbred sin." Otherwise we must 
modify the term. In common thought, 
apart from theology, guilt is not attached 
unless there is intelligent infraction of the 
law. In cases of mental unbalance or in- 
sanity we may restrain the unfortunate per- 
son but we do not impute guilt. This is a 
principle plainly understood in civil law and 
holds throughout. But we desire to keep 
away from the critical and within the bounds 
of the practical, and there are still some com- 
monplace questions to ask. What of the 
"bad tempers" which more or less all chil- 
dren manifest? True enough, a child of a 
few days will manifest temper, and naturally 
enough, because he is the son of his parents 
who happen to have tempers. A small colt 
will also exhibit a "bad temper" and bite and 
kick the mother if she does not do to suit it. 
Who ever thought of attaching a moral sig- 
nificance to ill tempers manifested by the 
colt? Such manifestations are on the phys- 
ical basis entirely and obtain throughout the 
entire animal order, and of themselves have 
no moral significance. Moreover, the 
thoughtful parent would account it a great 

169 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

misfortune — ^indeed, he would consider it an 
affliction — if his son should evidence no 
temper. It is an evidence of a quality of 
embryonic character very essential to man- 
hood. Why look with horror upon some- 
thing which is very essential to well-devel- 
oped character? What the temper needs is 
not to be called bad names, but to be cultured 
into proper channels with developing intel- 
ligence. So with all the various outwork- 
ings of young life which have within them 
the possibilities of great evil if left uncon- 
trolled. The temper in the child is properly 
a matter for careful discipline because, if 
allowed free course, it will run away with 
him, and after a while, when the intelligence 
develops so that he does those naughty things 
with purpose, he becomes a sinner. So with 
all these inherited quahties — they are not of 
themselves sin, but if uncontrolled they will 
lead to sin. The home institution and the 
long period of infancy seem to have been 
designed for the very purpose of naturally 
and wisely developing these qualities. This 
view fixes the tremendous responsibility on 
the part of the parent. We cannot fathom 
the intricate relation of soul and body, but 

170 



CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

we do certainly know that because of the 
failure of parents to properly train the 
animal manifestations of childhood and be- 
cause of their failure to stimulate the soul 
quahties into control of bodily functions 
many youthful souls are early blighted by 
sin. It is no small matter to have the respon- 
sibihty of parenthood. 

Allow me to emphasize this point fur- 
ther. The assertion that there is no sin (in 
the sense of guilt) in the child who has not 
yet arrived at intelligent regulation of his 
conduct is not intended to convey the idea 
that these physical manifestations of in- 
herent tendencies have no moral significance. 
Far from it. The intention is to emphasize 
their colossal importance and to urge a care- 
ful consideration of them on the part of 
parents, teachers, and church workers. We 
want to have them properly named, how- 
ever, and we need to understand clearly 
what we are dealing with. A proper diag- 
nosis of a case is the first essential to intel- 
ligent treatment. Here is where the home, 
the church, and the Simday school continue 
to make their colossal blunder. They assume 
that the child is something apart from God ; 

171 



PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

but the child is God's child, and our work is 
to keep it such. "They were born his, and 
only in so far as they have gone from him 
must they return" (Bishop Quayle). We 
must wisely direct the childish instincts and 
curb what tends toward evil and cultivate 
what tends toward good. Good tendencies 
largely predominate. God is a greater fac- 
tor in the child life than the parent. God 
gives every Adam a new chance. If only 
we would do our part as God does his part, 
how much better the world would become 
speedily! The normal child is sweet and 
sunny and loving. The occasional bad tem- 
per is rare. We should not provoke wrath 
but rather cultivate the love and the sun- 
shine of the child. Let us give God a chance 
with the child. 

Another big term to which we have been 
clinging for a long time as if it were a sacred 
expression is "total depravity." Some way 
we seem to think that this idea has been 
written by the divine hand into our Scrip- 
tures and for one to take exception to it is 
little short of sacrilege. This is an expres- 
sion which we should erase entirely from our 
religious vocabulary. Surely, if this expres- 

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CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

sion ever has any proper application to souls 
made in the image of God, it must be in 
that region where those condemned to eternal 
death are commanded. By no authority of 
Christ can we apply it to any of his children 
here upon the earth, much less to the little 
child of whom he said, "To such belongeth 
the kingdom." The man who has a spark 
of the Divine in him, who may yet be 
redeemed by the Christ, is not totally 
depraved. Why will we persist in allowing 
expressions made by men to carry us far 
beyond the reality of the thing described and 
thus divert our attention from the vital idea? 
It is high time that we were emphasizing 
the worth of child souls and recognizing that, 
having been made in his image, the impress 
still abides though expressing itself through 
human bodies. "Crime is largely social in 
its origin, and all of us are more or less 
responsible for those among us who fail to 
preserve a moral equilibrium" (New York 
Times). We can very well afford to em- 
phasize the advice which Paul gives to 
Titus: "Let no man despise thee." An 
incarnated soul is of great importance in 
the sight of God, and therefore worthy of 

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PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

our attention. Surely, we may say with 
Christ's authority: "Let no man despise this 
child which has come fresh and pure from 
the hand of God, and let no man neglect 
this child which God has intrusted to his 
care. It were better for him that a mill- 
stone be hanged about his neck and that he 
be drowned than that he should offend one 
of these little ones." 

There remains at least one other great 
principle involved in this discussion which 
needs some consideration for the sake of 
clearness — the question of childhood conver- 
sion. This has been a much-discussed ques- 
tion and there is no need to enter into it 
minutely except to make our position clear 
in view of what has already been said. I am 
convinced that much of the difference of 
opinion on this subject arises from different 
conceptions of what is involved in conver- 
sion. You will find opinions differing all the 
way from a simple change of mind toward 
God as one extreme to the most cataclysmic 
transformation on the other extreme, and 
between the two extremes numerous shades 
of opinion. If we seek to apply the term 
"conversion" in the extreme cataclysmic 

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CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

sense to the child who has not consciously 
gone into sin, it must be doubted whether 
it has any application. If we insist on the 
universal necessity for conversion and can 
conceive of a gradual unfoldment of the 
child life toward God as conversion, as some 
do, it becomes simply a matter of definition 
and no one will object to applying that term 
in that sense. But the more common notion 
of conversion involves a sense of guilt and 
a definite repentance and a definite sense of 
forgiveness, which are all beyond the child 
mind in the instinctive period. In such sense 
we must protest against the use of the word 
"conversion" as applied to child life. We 
must protest also against the common prac- 
tice of trying to force children into this ex- 
perience and causing them to profess an 
experience which they have not had. If 
Christ is to be accepted as the authority in 
this matter, there is left no room for this 
sort of experience. He was speaking to 
religious adults when he said, "Except ye 
turn, and become as little children, ye shall 
in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven" 
(Matt. 18. 3). It is only a fair inference 
that children may enter in, since they are 

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PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

held up as the example like to which we 
adults must become if we would enter in. 
The spirit of these words is carried out 
through all the teaching of Jesus. What does 
it signify? Only one meaning can be at- 
tached to it, and that is that the child who 
has not gone into willful wrongdoing is for 
that reason acceptable to him. Instead of 
setting up a transformed adult as a model 
of Christian virtue Christ sets up the pure 
child. This leaves small necessity for child- 
hood conversion as we commonly speak 
of it. 

The late Dr. Emory Miller, a man of pro- 
found spiritual vision, was accustomed to 
define heaven as "a place of harmonious 
activity." No one can think that the little 
child in the mother's arms, if taken back 
from whence it came, would introduce much 
discord into that realm of absolute harmony. 
We have long since revolted at the idea of 
a little child being lost when it is taken away 
from us. Why not consider them saved 
when they are still with us, and treat them 
accordingly? We may accept Christ's words 
unconditionally and take the child for what 
God intends him — a pure soul with no taint 

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CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

of sin resting upon him. That much is 
God's work, and now ours is begun. Our 
problem is to keep him pure and free from 
sin, to induce this new Adam to want to do 
the right instead of the wrong. I beheve 
wise parents and a wise and sympathetic 
church can succeed very markedly in doing 
this thing, though it is no easy task. We 
can, by the grace of God, take hold upon 
those child instincts and help them to un- 
fold, so that with the dawning of the moral 
consciousness the child will want to do the 
right. If the child is God's child at birth, 
and if with his first intelligent choosing he 
has been so trained that he chooses to con- 
tinue as God's child, who shall deny him 
the right? He will doubtless do many 
wrongs, but the godly parents will have so 
connected wrongdoing with sin against God 
that the child will understand it and will by 
proper repentance seek forgiveness of God 
for the wrong done. The transition from 
instinctive to intelligent action is made, and 
during the gradual change righteousness be- 
comes the choice of the child and he is con- 
sciously serving God of his own volition. 
Why, then, should we force that child 

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PARENT, CHILD, AND CHURCH 

through a process well suited to a hardened 
sinner, and make him believe he has been 
converted while all the time he has had his 
heart turned toward God? The most earnest 
adult Christian, even though he may have 
had a most glorious and cataclysmic conver- 
sion, will doubtless have need of forgive- 
ness for wrongs done against God. Shall 
we not accord the well-trained child the same 
privilege of seeking forgiveness for specific 
sins? The advantage is with the child be- 
cause of the simphcity and sincerity of his 
purpose in coming to God. This outlines a 
tremendous responsibility for parents and 
the church, but certainly this responsibility 
is ours and we cannot lessen it by closing 
our eyes. That too many of our children are 
wandering away is evident. That more care 
for the child's religious life would help to 
stop the prodigal waste is conceded by all 
religious teachers. Therefore let nothing be 
left undone that will help to save the boys 
and girls to God and the church. 

The late Professor Borden P. Bowne 
used to caution classes of young ministers 
against trying to get people to experience 
theology. Plainly, this is what we have 

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CHILDHOOD RELIGION 

been trying to do with our children. We 
have been trying to get them to experience 
adult theology. We have had a system of 
theology and we have been greatly concerned 
about fitting children into the mold, and 
childhood has suffered as a result. We can- 
not place too much emphasis upon conver- 
sion for those who have willfully gone into 
sin. The tendency to-day is to minimize 
this important work of grace. But to try 
by some doubtful expedient to force chil- 
dren into an adult theological mold is un- 
pardonable. The disciples deserved the 
Master's rebuke when they hindered the 
children from coming to him. We shall 
surely be sorely rebuked if we continue to 
block the child's path to the throne of God. 



179 



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